Student teachers’ reflections and experiences of language sensitivity and scaffolding in immersion classrooms.

This study is conducted within the Erasmus+ Key Action 3 Project LISTIAC (Linguistically sensitive teaching in all classrooms) that aims at changing monolingually framed policies to linguistically sensitive teaching in teacher cognition, teacher education curricula and professional development. The study examines how student teachers participating in a pre-service immersion teacher training program in Finland discuss and reflect on implications arisen from their own experiences of teaching in Swedish immersion classes during their fourth and final practice period in May 2019. The participants of the study (n=11) were divided into groups and asked to discuss four different issues related to content and language integrated teaching. Balancing between content and language and recognizing their interdependency have in several studies proven to be of critical importance in language immersion and other content-based language programs (see e.g. special issue of Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 6:2, 2018; Cammarata, Tedick & Osborn 2016; Nikula, Dalton-Puffer, Llinares & Lorenzo 2016). Individual teachers have, irrespectively of geographical context, expressed that they find it challenging to operationalize an integrating approach, and it is especially the language-oriented component that raises concern. In light of these findings the presentation initially focusses on the participants’ reflections on what teacher language awareness and teacher language scaffolding in an immersion classroom entails in grades 1-6 and, if there are crucial linguistically sensitive and responsive teaching strategies that all teachers need to make use of. The second part concentrates on the explicit experiences of the participants to integrate language awareness and language scaffolding during content teaching and their evaluation of the integrating process. Data is analysed by using content analysis where identifications of individual similarities and differences are used as coding units in order to check if the participants reach consensus in their reflections and to identify future needs for development.