“In this picture there is a Norwegian teammate, we speak Swedish or English”. Immersion students as users of multiple languages

This presentation reports on a study on how language immersion students in Finland visualize and communicate their language use in informal spaces in school and out of school. Internationally, immersion education is a learning context that aims at developing functional bilingualism among students. On one hand, numerous studies have shown that students participating in immersion successfully use two languages for learning and classroom interaction (e.g. Tedick et al., 2011). On the other hand, international volumes reporting on second language immersion (summarized e.g. in Johnson & Swain, 1997) have indicated that a downside of immersion education is that the immersion language does not become a part of the everyday life of the students outside the school. However, there is hardly any ethnographic research available on the actual out-of-school use of languages among immersion students. Our study aims at filling that void. The participants attend a second language immersion program in Finland that introduces multiple languages within the program and, thus, aims at functional multilingualism (e.g. Björklund & Mård-Miettinen, 2011). The presentation addresses immersion students' use of their languages in informal spaces and is based on photographs taken by the students and on individual photo-elicitation interviews (N=17 primary and secondary school students). A content and discourse analytic approach was used to unpack the data. The overall results show that the participating immersion students identified themselves as users of multiple languages even outside the school. They gave multiple examples of regular and flexible use of several languages while participating in everyday activities. Methodologically, the use of visual data gave more versatile results than previous studies addressing multiple language use in immersion based on questionnaire and interview data.