Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies

Ideology in Swedish ELT

2023-05-11T16:49:51+03:00

Grounded in scholarship on multilingualism, this multimodal case study aims to identify factors related to ideologies of language and culture in an English language classroom in a public lower secondary school in Sweden for an enhanced understanding of learning conditions for multilingual students. Using a triangulation of methods, participant observation, materials analysis, and interviews, the study examines teaching practice, materiality, language use and teachers’ perspectives on multilingualism and their own teaching practices in the multilingual classroom. The study finds a predominance of factors rooted ideologies of monolingualism and monoculturalism. Teaching practice was marked by the traditional approach to teaching English with a focus on Britain/the U.K. as a homogenous monocultural and monolingual nation and a Swedishness norm dominated teaching practice and classroom interaction: extensive usage of the Swedish language, examples of teaching strategies related to a contrastive Swedish-English grammar approach and a study of target language culture from a national Swedish perspective. An application of Nancy Hornberger’s model of the continua of biliteracy to the data identifies teaching practice in the classroom as close to the privileged ends. The analysis of interviews suggests that the traditional approach was normalized and that teachers had limited awareness of pedagogical strategies for the inclusion of multilingual students.

Manifestations of an expert teacher’s practical theory of language pedagogy in translanguaging situations in early childhood education and care

2023-04-27T20:07:42+03:00

This case study explores how an expert teacher’s practical theory of language pedagogy is manifested in translanguaging situations involving the use of multilingual children’s home languages in early childhood education and care. Practical theory encompasses teachers’ views of good teaching in relation to values, aims and principles. We applied nexus analysis to observation data, analysed interactions in translanguaging situations involving multilingual children’s home languages and related them to the teacher’s practical theory of language pedagogy. The main result was that some principles and aims, such as pedagogical tact, were variously manifested in different situations, while others, such as utilising children’s language expertise, stayed the same across situations. Furthermore, multiple principles and aims from a practical theory can affect even activities of short duration. The results also show that translanguaging occurred both in teacher- and child-initiated situations, implying a dual locus of power when using the children’s home languages. The expert teacher’s practices were mostly in line with how she had previously verbalised her practical theory. The findings point to the importance of enhancing reflection on the dynamic relationship between practical theory and situational practices in both pre- and in-service teacher training.

Chronotopic identities of learners of Korean as a heritage language in Finland

2022-11-22T16:22:08+02:00

The noticeable growth of the number of immigrant pupils has led to the growing needs for heritage language education in Finland. However, language studies have tended to be mainly focused on the national languages and English at regular schools. In this article, I attempt to explore the identities of the young heritage language learners based on the learners’ personal multilingualism and lived experience. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, the time-space configuration manifested in the learners’ utterances, has served as a key resource for analysing the data of learners’ discourses on their language identities. Four distinctive chronotopes have been detected and implicated to frame various identities as language learners; the contemporaneous, the biographical, the social-historical chronotope and the ‘adventure time of everyday life.’ The findings show how the exploration of these chronotopes about the learners’ language repertoires and practices make visible the young learners’ playful sense-making process of constructing their identities. It has further led to an implication for language classrooms, where the learners’ agency to make sense of the identities from their own lives needs to be respected and encouraged.