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This collection examines the learning and teaching of minority languages for adult migrants in Europe, with studies featuring perspectives from adult migrants themselves as well as local authorities, teachers, education planners and representatives from working life. The volume provides context on the attitudes and ideologies which inform adult migrant language education in different minority languages in Europe. Adult migrant language learners are understood here as newcomers settling and living in regions where the minority language is politically acknowledged and societally significant. The studies presented in the chapters are all original, and most are based on qualitative data such as interviews, ethnographic observations and policy documents. Some authors draw upon census and register data and surveys. The book is designed to be relatable to policy formation and implementation in other national contexts, in Europe and beyond. This book will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers in language education, language and migration, language and mobility, minority language studies, language policy and linguistic ethnography, as well as language policy professionals.
Adult Language Education and Migration: Challenging Agendas in Policy and Practice provides a lively and critical examination of policy and practice in language education for adult migrants around the world, showing how opportunities for learning the language of a new country both shape and are shaped by policy moves. Language policies for migrants are often controversial and hotly contested, but at the same time innovative teaching practices are emerging in response to the language learning needs of today’s mobile populations. This book: analyses and challenges language education policies relating to adult migrants in nine countries; provides a comparative study with separate chapters on policy and practice in each country; focuses on Australia, Canada, Spain (Catalonia), Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Adult Language Education and Migration is essential reading for practitioners, students and researchers working in the area of language education in migration contexts.
In this volume, authors from four disciplines join forces to develop an analysis of political discourse on a comparative and multidisciplinary basis. Theoretically the book draws on the concept of language policy, operationalising it through the politics and policies of Finland and Sweden.
More than half a million Swedes – one in twenty – is of Finnish descent. This book explores Finnishness, multilingualism and identities of young people with Finnish background in Sweden. What does it mean to grow up in a Finnish family in Sweden? Who are ‘real Finns’ and what does it take to be(come) one? Is a shared minority language essential for the survival of the minority, or can a minority culture stay viable without it? What is Finnishness and who, in the end, can define ethnicity? How to make sense of, and how to present interviews that are rich with imitations of accents, jokes and laughter? Representations of Finnishness is Sweden is an ethnographic interview study in the domain of applied language studies. This book is aimed at readers interested in sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and the study of identities. Interviewees’ voices take a central position in this book and interview excerpts are used not only as illustrations, but also serve as starting points for discussing broader theoretical concepts.
First published in 2003. Europe: lives in transition gives a voice to people living through transition, opening a door for outsiders to understand how such people have lived - an opportunity for one to speak and another to listen. The book has been deliberately written in an accessible, engaging and first-hand manner. Original quotes from various projects are woven together throughout the text.This book focuses explicitly on the experiences of respondents and functions largely to introduce themes and speakers. The principal themes are: identities, relationships, production, consumption and power. Except for selected crucial theoretical and methodological discussions, any academic commentary, which might overshadow the words of the respondents, is kept to a minimum. A key aim is to engage the readers with the text by confronting them with their own preconceptions and geographical imaginations. Each chapter opens with two activity sections to help readers think about the themes in broader terms, for example, by doing some research themselves. Each chapter closes with two further activity sections for review and discussion.
The aim of this pioneering volume is to advance our understanding of written language learning in instructed SLA by offering a collection of empirical studies in which the contribution of diverse theoretical perspectives to our understanding of L2 writing development will be explored. As such, the book represents a further attempt to situate written language learning at the core of applied linguistics research, in general, and SLA research, in particular, hence attempting to redress the oral bias of theoretical and empirical work in these fields. It adds a further building block onto recent TESOL initiatives aimed at understanding "development" in second and foreign language learning. Continuity from one chapter to another is provided by adherence to a consistent chapter model. The volume will be of great interest to academics in the disciplines of second/foreign language acquisition (SLA) and second/foreign language (L2) writing.
In this volume, scholars from the Nordic countries explore transitional processes around literacy in education in our contemporary complex and mobile society. Drawing on sociocultural theory, the chapters provide close, empirical analyses of identity construction, life trajectories, practices, concepts and politics in and around literacy in education.
The articles collected in this volume address linguistic diversity in Russia and Finland from different perspectives and aim to provide both theoretical and empirical knowledge concerning recently emerged multilingual and multicultural developments. The topics include representations and conceptualisations of multilingualism, the language education of immigrants, the linguistic rights of ethnic minorities, language policy, and ideologies underlying multilingual activities. Linguistic and cultural diversity is approached from different theoretical and methodological perspectives (e.g. discourse analysis, ethnography). The focus is on both micro and macro level phenomena. The articles show how the ideologies that underlie language policies and also various grass-root multilingual practices are conditioned by broader political, historical and socio-cultural contexts.
The book discusses recycled discourses of language and nationalism in Finnish higher education, demonstrating the need to look beyond language in the study of language policies of higher education. It analyses the historical and political layeredness of language policies as well as the intertwined nature of national and international developments in understanding new nationalism. Finnish higher education language policies were fuelled by the dynamics and tensions between the national languages Finnish and Swedish until the 2000s, when English begins to catalyse post nationalist discourses of economy and competitiveness. In the 2010s, English begins to be seen as a threat to Finnish. Educational, economic and epistemic nationalism emerge as the main cycles of new nationalist language policies in Finnish higher education. The book will be of interest to language policy and higher education scholars and practitioners, as well as graduate students language policy and higher education.