“In one sentence, there can easily be three different languages”: Immersion students as users of multiple languages
Date: Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Time: from 3 to 3:45 p.m.
On site: CRX C020 (niveau sous-sol)
Online : https://connect.uottawa.ca/educlang/
Details
This presentation reports on research focusing on how language immersion students in Finland use their languages 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 education successfully use two languages for learning and communication in educational contexts (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. This presentation reports on such research in Finland – a bilingual country with two national languages – with a second language immersion program 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 visual data (photographs taken by the students) and on individual photo-elicitation interviews (N=10 primary and secondary school students). The overall results show that the participating students identified themselves as users of multiple languages. When asked to visualize their use of languages, the students gave multiple examples of flexible use of several languages while participating in everyday activities. Methodologically, the use of visual data gave more versatile results than previous studies based on questionnaire and interview data.
Speaker
Karita Mård-Miettinen is an Associate Professor in applied linguistics (language learning and teaching) and a docent on early language education in the Department of Languages and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
The courses she teaches deal with various aspects of immersion education and multilingualism in a MA teacher education program for immersion teachers, and she also supervises MA and doctoral thesis on th fields of immersion and other types of bilingual and language education.
Her research focuses on multiple language use by learners and teachers in immersion and other forms of bilingual education (e.g. multilingual repertoire among immersion students, bilingual co-teaching, etc.) and on language education policies.