Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2017

This article presents findings from a Grade 7 religion lesson with 12–13 year-old multilingual Finnish-Swedish students in Finland. Here, focus is on the development of academic language and disciplinary literacy in multilingual environments, as they are crucial to students’ success and an area in need of both attention and support. A total of 117 minutes of six video-recorded group discussions, collected in a classroom study in a Swedish-medium school in Finland, were analyzed. The aim was to explore how students used everyday language and academic language to co-construct meaning of academic text and to investigate resources that were used by multilingual students and teachers to facilitate access to content for students instructed through Swedish. Our findings focus mainly on discussions in one group of four students as they were answering text questions. This group bridged academic and everyday language by creating linguistic chains that linked the two and used multiple resources, such as previous knowledge, the textbook, asking the teacher, and using Finnish in order to ensure each participant’s full understanding of the subject.

CLIL (content and language integrated learning) is an educational approach where a classroom subject is taught through a second language. However, its core features are ambiguously interpreted. Research on CLIL teaching has consistently shown that teachers focus their methodological efforts on the teaching of subject matter concepts and take any language related aspects mostly as by-products of such an approach. This has led to only sparsely planned methodological efforts when it comes to the teaching of language. Contrary to this, it is argued in this hermeneutical study that thinking and language acquisition are inextricably intertwined and CLIL teachers are therefore by definition also language teachers. Following this, the author reports on a pedagogical CLIL model, named SALT, that was devised for and successfully implemented in CLIL training courses to support subject teachers on their way to becoming language-aware CLIL teachers. Pedagogical procedures of the model's principles and concepts are also presented.

This case study explores the questions of how national and local education policies address languages of instruction for a Swedish compulsory school offering English-medium instruction (hereafter EMI) as well as how these policies are interpreted and implemented in practice. Critical discourse analysis provides a framework for examining the relationship between stated and enacted policies at the various institutional levels. Methods from linguistic ethnography yielded rich data including classroom observations, interviews, and artifact collection over a period of three school years in grades four through six. Findings from the study reveal discourses of language hierarchies, a native speaker ideal privileging English and practices that reflect varying degrees of language separation. While Swedish is occasionally used to support English-medium content learning, there is little space for students’ mother tongues in the mainstream classroom. The findings from this study have implications for how stakeholders may put language-in-education policies into practice in EMI programs.

English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) has rapidly become a widespread phenomenon in Europe, especially in many Italian institutions. The growth of EMI is currently exponential as well as non-regimented; it is therefore very important to obtain updated, local data regarding this phenomenon, which could be of use in developing future national policies. This study describes the data gathered in a 2015 survey of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) which included all Italian universities. The survey concentrated on three areas, the lecturers and students involved and the overall organisation of the courses in both private and public institutions in the North, Centre and South of Italy. The paper updates information on the same topic gathered from a previous questionnaire (Costa & Coleman, 2012), reflecting on what has changed during the intervening three years.

This summary reports on an ethnographic study conducted in French immersion concerning the writing development of at-risk and typically developing writers. Eight Grade 7 writers – four at-risk and four typically developing – were observed closely during classroom observations and participated in think-aloud protocols at the beginning and at the end of the school year 2012–2013 as well as in formal and informal interviews. In addition, the context in which those eight writers were learning to write was taken into consideration, therefore a total of 20 students participated in this study. Four teachers, the resource teacher, the counselor, and the two administrators were informants. Adopting a sociocognitive lense, the data reported here provide a detailed description of how the socioaffective, affective, and academic domains affected writing development, especially for at-risk writers. In order to respond to the affective and social needs of the writers of this study, a Sociocognitive Model of Interventions for Writing Instruction is proposed.