We focus on migrants' opportunities to develop and utilize their field-specific language resources in practical training. Some participants of our ethnographic study found their access to meaningful tasks and L2 resources to be too limited. Language awareness should thus be an integral part of supervision practices in vocational education.
Many migrants have problems in accessing working life in Finland, which puts education system under pressure as well. The key idea of the recent reform of vocational education (non-academic secondary education) has been to create personalized study paths and to maximise learning in the workplace. This paper aims to find out how the new model serves the needs of migrants whose education has been interrupted and whose Finnish L2 skills are still rather limited. Four of the five key participants are young adults who have come to Finland as unaccompanied minors and now entered vocational education. Their lived experiences of practical training at workplace will be analysed in an ecological framework (van Lier 2000) which highlights the relationship between the learner and his/her environment. The focus is on the participants' opportunities to develop and utilize their field-specific language resources in practical training and on their experiences of agency or lack of it. The data consist of multilingual ethnographic interviews with the key participants and their teachers and supervisors, and some authentic workplace interactions. The narrative small stories analysis (Georgakopoulou 2015) shows that access to meaningful tasks and language resources is commonly found to be too limited, and language awareness should thus be an integral part of all supervision practices. This resonates with earlier findings in the field: migrants are still easily left alone with linguistically simple tasks instead of providing them access to ambitious training which could better promote their agency and L2 development. Also more inclusive and collaborative practices are to be observed, however. Georgakopoulou, A. 2015. Small Stories Research: Methods - analysis - outreach. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The Handbook of Narrative Analysis (pp. 255-271). Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Van Lier, L. (2000). From Input to Affordance: Social Interactive Learning from an Ecological Perspective. In J.P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning (pp. 245-259). Oxford: OUP.
