Creating a bilingual pre-school classroom: the multilayered discourses of a bilingual teacher

Abstract

Teachers have an agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices. In the current study we interviewed a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland during the first year of implementing a new way of working bilingually with a class of monolingual children. Applying nexus analysis, we explored the teacher discourses on the trajectory of the development of the new approach; the concepts, places and people that were circulating in her reflections; and how these connected with larger societal discourses. The analysis showed that the teacher's new bilingual language practices demanded the renegotiation of previously held personal and professional beliefs. The teacher reflections were aggregates of discourses presenting different perspectives and voices. While her bilingual practices challenged prevailing norms in society – especially those on separating languages in teaching – she also recycled discourses which confirmed the idea of Finland as a society built on parallel monolingualism. We argue that it is important to acknowledge the perspectives of teachers, and that there are all kinds of factors which drive and affect the work of a bilingual pre-school teacher. We also call for cross-cultural studies, as teachers' work is always embedded in a sociolinguistic setting.

Keywords:

• bilingual pre-school education
• teacher reflections
• bilingual teacher
• nexus analysis
• language policies
• bilingual practices

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Anu Palojärvi (formerly Lahtinen) for providing teacher interview material.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Note

Notes

1. Transcription keys: Text in normal font uttered in Swedish, bold face in Finnish; words in italics phonologically stressed; (.) a brief pause; [—] stretches of speech have been omitted; [= ] clarification; text within [ ] added to complete an utterance syntactically or semantically; extra-linguistic information given within ( ); and ‘text within single quotation marks’ represent reported speech/thought.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland [grant number 13/1118-1303].