Swedish immersion in the early years in Finland

Abstract

Immersion education in Finland is a one-way (monolingual) early total Swedish programme for Finnish-speaking students. This immersion provision is offered at kindergarten level (ages 3–5), at preschool (age 6) and at primary levels (grades 1–9). Here, a brief synthesis of Finnish research studies on the early years in Swedish immersion is first provided, reviewing results from a number of quantitative and qualitative research studies. In order to present a comprehensive view of the Finnish context, both the kindergarten and preschool environments are analysed as contexts for early second-language learning and teaching. The second part of this article presents results from a recent Finnish study of immersion in kindergarten, where analyses of dialogue sequences make it possible to examine in depth how immersion children in Finland learn their new language in everyday situations within immersion settings. Examples illustrate the importance of the educator's explicit verbalisations of every joint activity and shared context. When the educator continuously puts into words the actions jointly focused upon by child and adult, she provides meaningful L2 input and, at the same time, promotes children's understanding of daily activities. The excerpts also show developments in children's emerging L2 utterances, from recycled Swedish language items to spontaneous L2 use.

Keywords:

• one-way immersion
• immersion pedagogy
• kindergarten
• ethnography
• learning in interaction
• parental expectations

Notes

1. Basic education is a term used in Finland for the compulsory education in grades 1–9. Grades 1–6 was formerly called ‘primary school’ and grades 7–9 ‘secondary school’ but these have been labelled ‘basic education' since their integration some years ago.

2. The example is abbreviated here. The whole example is analysed in Savijärvi and Seppänen (2010).