Becoming a multilingual health professional in vocational education : two adult migrants’ translanguaging trajectories

Abstract

The number of migrant students in vocational education in Finland is rising. Their educational backgrounds and language resources are diverse, and research is needed to gain better understanding on how their existing knowledge can be acknowledged, supported, and deployed when they become multilingual professionals in their own fields. In this ethnographic study, we drew on the theoretical approaches of translanguaging and language architecture (García, O., and T.Kleyn. 2016. “Translanguaging Theory in Education.” In Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments, edited by O. García, and T. Kleyn, 9–33. New York, London: Routledge; Li, Wei. 2018. “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language.” Applied Linguistics 39 (1): 9–30; Flores, N. 2020. “From Academic Language to Language Architecture: Challenging Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Research and Practice.” Theory Into Practice 59 (1): 22–31). Both concepts promote the integration of students’ multilingual resources in their content studies.

We focused on two multilingual students studying to become practical nurses. We applied small stories analysis (Georgakopoulou, A. 2015. “Small Stories Research: Methods - Analysis - Outreach.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, edited by A. De Fina, and A. Georgakopoulou, 255–271. Wiley Blackwell) to ascertain how translanguaging practices support them in developing their vocational competence and language architecture. The data comprised ethnographic observations, interviews, and audio-recorded interaction. Although the official language of instruction is Finnish, students are encouraged to integrate their multilingual resources into their vocational development. The analysis illustrates how translanguaging not only deepens multilingual students’ understanding of field-specific content but also enables them to strategically use and strengthen their multilingual resources.