Abstract
Teachers in officially bilingual Finland are, according to the national curricular guidelines, expected to promote the development of language awareness and multilingual competence among their students. In order to do so, they need a well-developed multilingual awareness themselves. The concept Dominant Language Constellation could be used as a tool to describe the domains and functions of different languages and to promote multilingual awareness among student teachers. Thus the aim of this chapter is to describe what patterns of Dominant Language Constellations emerge at the societal and individual levels within the domain of education in Finland and to compare how these societal and individual patterns match each other. The research approach is qualitative and the data consist of the objectives and assessment descriptors specified for languages in the last two national curricula (2004, 2014) and data from two pre-service student teachers in Swedish-medium teacher education and two Swedish immersion student teachers. The chapter ends with a discussion of the usefulness of Dominant Language Constellation as a tool for describing multilingual language patterns at the societal and individual levels as well as for developing multilingual awareness among student teachers in Finland.
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Björklund, S., Björklund, M., Sjöholm, K. (2020). Societal Versus Individual Patterns of DLCs in a Finnish Educational Context – Present State and Challenges for the Future. In: Lo Bianco, J., Aronin, L. (eds) Dominant Language Constellations. Educational Linguistics, vol 47. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52336-7_6
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