An exploration of how teacher students create their understanding of language awareness

Abstract

Globalisation and increased migration have led to demographic shifts in Finnish classrooms with more pupils coming from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The Finnish national core curriculum acknowledges this shift defining school communities and each community member as being multilingual stressing the importance of school communities to be language aware. Studies indicate that the practical implementation of language aware pedagogies are lacking in Finland and the purpose of this study is to explore how teacher students at the University of Jyväskylä create their understanding of language awareness. The study compares discourses of 14 class teacher and 3 special education teacher students in order to determine whether their educational backgrounds influence their understanding of language awareness. Data were collected by a field worker for a research project being conducted by the university. An iterative qualitative approach was used for the analysis. Findings indicated that class teacher and special education teacher students created their understanding of language awareness slightly differently from one another, with their educational backgrounds potentially affecting how they create this understanding. The main conclusion from this study is that class and special education teacher students could benefit from increased collaboration and sharing of knowledge to ensure that they are better equipped to meet the linguistic demands of present-day Finnish classrooms.