Research inevitably shows how students benefit from integrative and blending linguistic practices, compared with keeping to one language within one textual event in classroom. Still, the norms that steer practices are belief-based and change slowly. Teachers are also in need of practical tools for implementing good ideas. Large data from Finnish schools show three types of teacher attitudes towards multilingualism: positive, deliberating, and cautious. This presentation gives voice particularly to the deliberating teachers.
Educators have long recognized the need to stop promoting parallel monolingualisms, that is, keeping strictly to one named language within one textual event in the classroom. For the sake of meaning making, proceeding towards integrative, even blending models of language usage in teaching has proved beneficial to multilingual learners (Cummins et al. 2015; Prediger et al. 2019). For all students, pedagogical blending offers opportunities to learn language(s) and about language in classroom interaction. Norms that steer language education are usually based more on beliefs than academic knowledge about good language pedagogy. In this study, we analyze what linguistic norms the teachers, headmasters and educational administrators in Finland manifest when they talk about multilingual students and arrangements for transitional education. Our data come from a research and evaluation project funded by the Finnish National Board of Education, called KUPERA (The Cultural, Worldview and Language Awareness in Basic Education) and carried out by the University of Helsinki, Centre for Educational Assessment (CEA). A nation-wide research survey was carried out in 2020. The survey had 5 parts, and this study belongs to the fifth part, called Many languages at school. 2864 teachers in 824 schools all over Finland participated the survey. Part 5 was analysed statistically by Suuriniemi, Ahlholm & Salonen (in press). We found three profiles for teachers in their attitude towards multilingualism: positive (19 %), deliberating (37 %) and cautious (44 %). This presentation shows the qualitative analysis of 160 supplementary comments made by the respondents. We found contradictory but simultaneous views on multilingualism Finnish education. Since multilingual students are more numerous in the biggest cities in (Southern) Finland, we found regional differences in the expressions of linguistic positions. In urban areas, educators expressed positive and deliberating views on multilingualism, and the were concerned of language awareness in study materials.
