Kieltä, toimintaa, sisältöjä

Abstract

In this introduction, we highlight common interests within research in three related educational contexts: language immersion, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and Finnish or Swedish as second language education in Finland. Although each has their specific foci of interest and have developed as independent research fields, they all share an interest in language learning through meaningful language use as well as in simultaneous learning and teaching of language and content. These issues can be approached from multiple viewpoints as demonstrated by the individual contributions in this volume, introduced briefly in this article. The contributions are organised into three thematic areas, the first addressing content-specific language learning through a second or a foreign language, and the other two thematic areas focusing on the use of multilingual language resources and beliefs about multilingualism and learning in a second or a foreign language, respectively.