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

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Creating a bilingual pre-school classroom: the multilayered discourses of a bilingual teacher © 2015 Taylor & Francis Accepted version (Final draft) Palviainen, Åsa; Mård-Miettinen, Karita Palviainen, Å., & Mård-Miettinen, K. (2015). Creating a bilingual pre-school classroom: the multilayered discourses of a bilingual teacher. Language and Education, 29(5), 381-399. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2015.1009092 2015 Creating a Bilingual Pre-school Classroom: The Multilayered Discourses of a Bilingual Teacher Åsa Palviainen Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland Corresponding details: Department of Languages P.O. Box 35 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland [email protected] Karita Mård-Miettinen Department of Scandinavian Languages, University of Vaasa, Vaasa, Finland Acknowledgements: This work was supported by The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland [Grant No 13/1118-1303]. The authors wish to thank Anu Palojärvi (formerly Lahtinen) for providing teacher interview material. Creating a Bilingual Pre-school Classroom: The Multilayered Discourses of a Bilingual Teacher 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 (Scollon and Scollon 2004), 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 Introduction The current study responds to a call to examine teachers’ agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices (e.g. Canaragajah 2005; Hornberger and Johnson 2007; Menken and García 2010). As Ricento and Hornberger (1996) stated in formulating their famous onion metaphor over educational language policy and planning processes, the classroom practitioner should be placed at the very centre of the onion. In order to get a complete understanding of how language policies in education are implemented it is, according to Ricento and Hornberger, necessary to take into account and “unpeel” the different and complex layers of agents, levels and processes involved in the policy-making. At the centre of the onion in the current study we find a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland who had recently implemented a bilingual approach to working with a class of monolingual children, using both Finnish and Swedish in her communication with them. The practice of using two languages concurrently was new to her, in both professional and private life, and diverged from common language practice within the educational field in Finland as well as from prevailing norms in society. It has already been shown that teachers do sometimes find themselves surrounded by competing and conflicting discourses on different levels, which they have to handle. By way of example, Dubetz and de Jong (2011) showed how teachers may find themselves in contested environments where their notions of best practices for emergent bilinguals contradict those expressed in state policies in education (see also Lemberger 1997). The teacher was interviewed on three occasions during the first year of her implementation of the new bilingual teaching practices, initially described as language showers in Swedish. In the study we use nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004), a type of ethnographic discourse analysis, as a tool to unpack the complexities (i.e. to “unpeel” the onion layers) within the teacher discourses. Our goals were to identify what factors had a significant impact on her work, to see how she coped with conflicting discourses and expectations and, importantly, to explore how her ways of thinking and working developed in the course of implementing the language showers. As a background to the empirical study, we present in the following sections previous research on bilingual teachers’ reflections and beliefs and existing gaps in research; nexus analysis as a framework; and the sociolinguistic and educational context of Finland. Bilingual Teachers’ Reflections and Beliefs The beliefs held by teachers are intrinsically related to their actions, which in turn guide and influence their beliefs, which thus play an important role in how they carry out their teaching (e.g. Barcelos and Kalaja 2012; Borg 2003). Teacher beliefs can show a complexity and even contradictoriness which pose challenges. For example, Vaish (2012) examined teacher beliefs regarding bilingualism in an English-medium reading programme in Singapore. Using a combination of surveys, in-depth interviews with and observations of teachers, she found contradictions in beliefs such as that teachers believed in the strict separation of languages in the classroom (creating an English-only environment for non-English speaking students) at the same time as they believed that the use of the student’s L1 in the classroom can aid in learning the L2 (English). Teachers’ reflections on second language teaching are regarded as being a critical element in their professional activity (Luttenberg and Bergen, 2008; Walsh 2013). Up to now, a limited number of studies have focused on bilingual teachers' reflections on their classroom practices and experiences (Conteh 2007; DePalma 2010; Lemberger 1997; Mård-Miettinen and Palviainen 2014; Schwartz and Asli 2013; Schwartz, Mor-Sommerfeld, and Leikin 2010). For example, Lemberger (1997) shed light on the complex nature of bilingual teaching. Through the narratives of eight bilingual teachers with diverse backgrounds and working in different educational settings and programmes in the US, Lemberger shared successful language strategies that the teachers applied, as well as challenges they experienced. Lemberger (1997, 137) described the teachers as being ‘all fighters, persistent, with a strong sense of self and of their missions as bilingual teachers’ and at the same time ‘the teachers faced similar attitudes and misunderstandings about their language and culture because of the prevailing monolingual-monocultural societal norms’. Some research has been done on teachers’ bilingual language practices in pre-school contexts (e.g. Gort and Pointier 2012) but more rarely on pre-school teachers’ reflections on their own professional activity. Schwartz, Mor-Sommerfeld, and Leikin (2010), however, showed how bilingual teachers in Russian-Hebrew speaking pre-schools in Israel became aware through reflection of a need for theoretical knowledge for teaching in a bilingual classroom, rather than simply relying on instinct and trial and error. In the light of what has been said above, we can identify certain gaps in the research that need to be filled. First, we argue for the importance of research on teachers’ reflections, experiences and beliefs, since these often contribute to educational and social change (e.g. Ricento and Hornberger 1996). In particular there is a lack of studies on bilingual teachers in this respect. Secondly, although the pre-school stage is one of the first important transitional steps from home to the social environment and socialization of the child, little is known about pre-school bilingual education. Indeed, pre-school bilingual education often falls between two more established areas of research: that on early bilingual language acquisition (e.g. De Houwer 2009) on the one hand, and that on bilingual education in primary and secondary schools (e.g. García 2009) on the other. Thirdly, we need to reconsider the methodologies to be used to map teacher beliefs and experiences within the larger sociolinguistic processes in which they are embedded. Vaish (2012), for example, pointed out the dominance of psychological studies of teacher beliefs, in which quantitative surveys typically are used as instruments, and called for more sociolinguistic approaches and methods. In the current ethnographic study we combine teacher observations and interviews and apply discourse analysis as a tool to understand the complexities. Teacher discourse as a nexus Nexus analysis is about identifying and understanding the various factors influencing a social action and mapping the relevant discourses that are circulating at a given moment (Scollon and Scollon 2004). As Lemberger (1997, 10–11) noted, numerous factors on different levels can affect the work of a bilingual teacher: society (e.g. policies on different levels, bilingual programme models, research, teacher certification); the community (e.g. parents, health and social services); the school (e.g. administration, the principal, teachers, the curriculum); and the classroom (e.g. students, teaching and assessment practices). In addition, the teacher’s own personal experiences may be crucial: their family and childhood, pedagogical training, other work experiences, language skills, emotional and philosophical orientations, attitudes to bilingualism, and cultural identity issues, for instance. By performing a nexus analysis, the researcher draws attention to the factors or discourses that are relevant or foregrounded in the data explored; in this case, the reflections of a bilingual teacher. In nexus analysis, social action, i.e. ‘any action taken by an individual with reference to a social network’ (Scollon and Scollon, 2004, 11), is at the core and is examined as a nexus. It is nested and multilayered in both time and space; broader social issues and micro-actions, as well as discourses emanating from different points in time, come together in one and the same nexus (Scollon and Scollon 2004, 14). The nexus is found at the intersection of the historical body of the participant(s) – the personal experience, habits, beliefs and attitudes within an individual; the interaction order – social arrangements, interactional rules and the setting; and the discourses in place – discourses of all kinds that circulate through the nexus (see Figure 1). That is, all the elements are always involved and affect the nexus. Figure 1: The three elements of social action. (Adapted from Scollon and Scollon [2004, 154].) In the current study, the teacher and her reflections constitute the nexus. The focus is on identifying the discourses in place, i.e. the concepts, places and people the teacher mentions as critical elements in her process of implementing the new bilingual practices in her pre-school classroom. We also examine the role of the historical body, such as the beliefs held, in this process. In the current study, we connect the micro-actions of the teacher on the one hand with largescale social discourses on the other. This perspective is often lacking (see however e.g. Johnson 2009; Johnson and Freeman 2010; Ricento 2000). Within a nexus analysis framework, Hult (2012) has shown how pre-service English language teachers in Sweden during their teacher training recycled and negotiated language policy discourses from the national curricula. Lane (2010) used conversations and sociolinguistic interviews as the basis for an analysis of a language shift in a Kven community in northern Norway. She was able to show how large-scale discourses, such as national language policies and language attitudes, over time became internalised and forced action in terms of language choice in individuals. In a study on family language policies, Palviainen and Boyd (2013) combined interviews and video-recorded observations of three bilingual FinnishSwedish families in Finland which all included children between 3 and 4 years of age. The nexus analysis showed how family language policies were co-constructed and negotiated by the family members through their everyday practices. Moreover, certain societal discourses were recycled by the parents, such as that bilingualism is inherently good and natural, and that for children bilingual simultaneous acquisition is effortless. Despite its applicability in connecting discourses from interviews with larger societal discourse cycles, nexus analysis has, however, seldom been applied to language teacher discourse. To our knowledge, the current study is the first one to apply nexus analysis in a pre-school teacher context. The Socio-political and Educational Context of Finland In order to situate the teacher’s reflections in a broader context, let us now turn briefly to a description of the history and status of Finnish and Swedish in Finland, and of the Finnish educational system. The Status of Finnish and Swedish Finland was an integral part of Sweden for six centuries until in 1809 it became an autonomous Grand Duchy under the Russian tsars. It gained its independence from Russia in 1917. Swedish was an important language throughout these times and the Constitution of Finland, drawn up in 1919, declares that Finnish and Swedish are the official languages of Finland. Swedish is formally an official language equal to Finnish, but it is a minority language in terms of number of speakers: in 2013, of the total Finnish population of 5.5 million people, 89.3 % were registered as Finnish speakers and 5.3 % as Swedish speakers (Official Statistics of Finland 2013). A majority of the municipalities or local authorities are officially monolingual Finnish-speaking; the remainder are either bilingual or monolingual Swedish-speaking. Although many citizens are bilingual, the Finnish societal system is to a large extent built on separate Swedishand Finnish-speaking institutions, which can be described as a system of parallel monolingualism (Heller 1999). Following these principles, Finnish-medium as well as Swedish-medium pre-schools and schools use one main language as the medium of instruction and all other languages are taught as separate subjects. Debates about Language Education Although the fact that Finland is a bilingual country is most often regarded as positive and enriching, there are certain political movements arguing for reducing the status and space of Swedish in Finland (Palviainen 2013). Since the late 1960s there has been an ongoing debate on the stimulated recall type: a videotape showing her interacting with children in the classroom functioned as a stimulus for the teacher to recall her “motivations and thought processes during the original event” (Gass and Mackey 2000, 25). Although the focus of the stimulus recall event was on the teacher explaining her bilingual use in the actual recording, she often digressed into other topics related to the implementation of the language showers. In conducting interviews and interpreting data, the researcher is a social actor and a part of the nexus examined (cf. Scollon and Scollon 2004, 156). In the stimulated recall situation, however, the researcher who was present had a fairly passive role as a listener and mainly only spoke to ask for clarification. As the time allowed for this first interview was too limited, the interview was resumed a month later (the delay caused by the intervening Christmas holidays). The last interview was conducted soon after the second; it was semi-structured, focusing particularly on the teacher’s reflections on her role as an educator (see Lahtinen [2013] for details). The interviews lasted for approximately three hours in total, were transcribed and have in this article been translated into English. In analysing (i.e., navigating) the data, we employed an inductive approach (Lane 2010). We first identified two major and recurring discourses in the teacher’s accounts: one was about language separation and the other about the objectives of the way of working with the language showers. In the next stage, following nexus analysis procedures and responding to the research questions, we mapped and unpacked the complexities of the relevant discourses on the historical trajectories within these two major discourses, as well as on the concepts, places and people that stood out as significant in them (Scollon and Scollon 2004, 159-160). We further mapped the teacher discourses (micro) with larger societal discourses (macro) to show how they circulated through the same nexus. In what follows, after analysis of the two discourses we zoom out and provide a summary of the development we found in the process of implementing the language showers . Nexus Analysis of the Two Teacher Discourses The Language Separation Discourse Johanna stressed as important principles in her new language practices the equal use of the two languages and the avoidance of direct translation between them (Mård-Miettinen and Palviainen 2014). She frequently addressed the issue of how she had changed her language practices from language separation (i.e., the monolingual use of either Finnish or Swedish) to alternation between the two languages. From the following extract from one of the interviews it becomes clear not only that the teacher previously used to practise language separation in both her professional and her private life, but also that the change of practices involved a quite radical change of beliefs for her (the teacher quotes are available in the original language as a supplementary file to the online article at http://www.tandfonline.com/rlae): this [=moving back and forth between the two languages] is something I used to have huge problems with because I always thought one person one language one place one language I am bilingual myself I have always spoken Swedish to my children and I have worked in Swedish-medium preschools and I have worked in language immersion pre-schools so it has been completely (.) for me to understand that this is allowed (.) [---] I had such big trouble [with it] The quotation illustrates that the means she had used before to separate Finnish from Swedish had been deeply submerged in her practice (Scollon and Scollon 2004, 163); it was not something she had questioned at all until she was appointed to give children language showers, and she needed to think about how to do it. In the passage she refers to three different roles she had had (as a bilingual speaker, as a parent, and as a teacher) and to three different contexts in which she had been active in the past (her family, a Swedish-medium pre-school, and an immersion pre-school). In all these roles and contexts, Johanna says, she had adhered to principles of language separation (i.e. ‘one person– one language’ or ‘one place–one language’). She had then found out that there was an alternative to the strict separation of languages and reported that this change in practices and ways of thinking was, to begin with, quite hard to accept (‘for me to understand that this is allowed … I had such big trouble’). In nexus analysis terms, what Johanna described here were radical changes in her historical body. She metaphorically described her process of changing attitudes as ‘having to put other glasses on’; she had to deconstruct old beliefs and open the way for new ones to be constructed (Woods 1996). In the following extract, Johanna made explicit her shift from a belief that the concurrent use of two languages confuses children to the view that children can manage and understand quite well when one speaker uses multiple languages: for sure I had, to begin with, that kind of thought that one person one language that how could I speak two languages two languages so that it doesn’t cause confusion or anything like that but then I got these things turned around in my head by [name of expert] that ‘for today’s children it’s completely normal that a person may speak two or why not three languages and make him-/herself understood’ [---] it has really turned out that the children don’t find it strange at all that I speak Finnish and Swedish [---] ‘oh my, it works this way too (.) in this way too if we think of language learning’ In describing how the shift happened, she reproduced an authoritative voice – an utterance from the expert she met before launching the language shower – and pointed out its importance for changing the direction of her thinking (cf. ‘I got these things turned around’). A similar voice was heard in the previous quotation; someone or something had mediated that bilingual practices in the classroom are ‘allowed’. It becomes further evident that, contrary to her presuppositions, these monolingual children did not find her bilingual language practices awkward or difficult. Her last expressive statement – ‘oh my, it works this way too’ – reflects her surprise as well as the insight that the bilingual language practices she began to use worked out as a perfectly viable alternative to a monolingual approach. The concept of ‘one person–one language’ (see e.g. Barron-Hauwaert 2004) was frequently repeated. In the extract below, the teacher refers to colleagues working in the Swedishmedium minority language section in the same ECEC building and presents their voice to show their strong commitment to the OPOL principle: but I know that even within our building that it is (.) [colleagues think] that ‘no (.) that no [it should be] one language one person’ Johanna presented the voice of her colleagues (‘no it should be one language one person’) to illustrate their objections to her bilingual practices. In this short quotation we thus find a shared physical space (i.e. the pre-school building), shared by people (colleagues) who have divergent beliefs about the most appropriate language practice in pedagogical contexts (i.e. OPOL or the concurrent use of two languages by one teacher). These conflicting discourses have also been described elsewhere in contexts of bilingual education (see e.g. Creese and Blackledge 2010). Language separation as a pedagogy and practice have long traditions – as discussed earlier, it is also firmly established in Finnish societal and educational contexts – and have proven to be effective in many contexts (see e.g. Björklund, Mård-Miettinen, and Savijärvi 2014). However, more recently practitioners and researchers have come to question language separation as the only pedagogy and practice and have called for more flexible, hybrid, multilingual approaches in the classroom (e.g. García 2009; Weber 2014). This kind of ideological clash, which is richly represented in Johanna’s accounts, thus circulated through the same nexus as larger cycles of social organisation and discourse. The teacher had worked earlier in the Swedish-medium section of this same ECEC unit, and in the passage below she reflects on the different language policies and practices in these two environments: actually I notice that I kind of think that the two languages are equal that they (.) that on the Swedish [pre-school] side one had that kind of that one tries to make that language [=Swedish] as active as possible that one kind of really tries to draw it out so that you get responses in Swedish but here [=in this classroom] that is cool (.) it is equally correct whether you respond in Finnish or in Swedish (.) and the calmness that you find in yourself in doing that The teacher refers to the different roles she has had in these two environments and to two different interaction orders (Scollon and Scollon 2004, 13). The teacher says in the quotation that when working in the minority-language context she needed to use certain strategies and even (mildly) force the children in order to have them respond in and use the minority language, Swedish (cf. ‘draw … out … responses’, the word ‘draw’ phonologically stressed). At the same time as she made it clear that she found it an important principle that both languages were equal, she also said that she felt that they did not have the same status in the Swedish-medium section. In the new teaching context (‘here [in this classroom]’) she was not responsible for developing productive language skills in Swedish and preparing the children for a Swedish-medium school. She declared that in that context, ‘it is equally correct whether you respond in Finnish or in Swedish’. In referring to an inner state (‘the calmness you find in yourself’) she showed an acceptance of and satisfaction with a language policy that admits bilingual practices on the part of both the teacher and the children. Still, she was aware of different contexts and needs (i.e. interaction orders): ‘but I do understand that the objectives are completely different here [in the Finnish-medium majority language section] than they are there [in the Swedish-medium minority language section]’. These comments show how her everyday work on a micro level connected with sociolinguistic and sociopolitical issues on a macro level. She realised that a minority language needs to be protected and supported in a region where the dominance of the majority language is overwhelming, whereas adding some knowledge of a minority language to the repertoire of speakers of a majority language is not subject to the same kind of pressures. Thus, working as a pre-school teacher of (bilingual) minority language-speaking children offers different challenges and pedagogical demands from working bilingually with (monolingual) majority language speakers who are going to continue their schooling in the majority language. The Objectives Discourse Another major teacher discourse was about the objectives of the language shower activities. The original description of the language showers and their aims was rather vague and superficial and the interviews revealed that for Johanna, forming the objectives and identifying how to achieve them were on-going preoccupations. Two significant objectives kept recurring in her discourses; to familiarise the children with Swedish and to develop positive language attitudes, both core characteristics of language shower practices (Mehistö, Marsh, and Frigols 2008; Nikula and Marsh 1997). We will start by analysing the first of these two objectives and by presenting an extract from our interviews that is truly multi-layered (bold text originally in Finnish): it is like this definition we agreed on familiarising the children with Swedish and not that I just sing a song or make a rhyme but it is more functional Several minor discourses and recycled concepts are embedded in this short quote. Firstly, the teacher defined the objectives of the language shower activities (‘familiarising the children with Swedish’) using Finnish formulations although the interview was otherwise carried out in Swedish. The Finnish wording – ruotsin kieleen tutustuminen – was reproduced and recycled from the advertisement (written in Finnish) directed at Finnish-speaking families before the new way of working was introduced (see previous section). This objective, also literally translated into Swedish (att bli bekant med svenskan), frequently recurred in the interviews, evidencing its importance to her own language practices. It also showed how the teacher’s discourses about classroom practices intertwine with written language policy texts (cf. Hult 2012). Secondly, in referring to the goal-setting process, Johanna used the inclusive pronominal reference ‘we’ to signal that there were other people involved besides Johanna herself. Later in the interview she explained who these people were: those were the objectives we put up together they were not my objectives but that it (.) well on behalf of the ECEC unit my boss and then in turn her boss [said] that ‘if to start this [activity] you have to have some kind of goal for it’ (.) but it was kind of diffuse and that was actually good The goal-setting was thus a joint venture and the formulation of an explicit goal a requirement set by her superiors in order for the language showers to get started in the first place. The quote shows that the implementation process involved several layers, as in the onion metaphor of Ricento and Hornberger (1996): the teacher, the head of the ECEC unit and the director of all ECEC units in the area all needed to agree on the objectives. Johanna further admitted vagueness in the goals, but at the same time she appreciated the independence and flexibility this gave her to develop her own methods, practices and means to achieve the goals. Thirdly, Johanna recycled content which is at the very core of language shower practices: learning a language through the singing of songs and saying of rhymes. To be more exact, she made use of these formulations in order to define what she was not doing (see also Lahtinen 2013). Instead, she argued for the application of a ‘more functional’ approach. Later in the interview, she elaborated on what she meant by ‘functional’ (Finnish original speech bolded): it is more like becoming familiar [with Swedish] through everyday activities (.) but to start with it was a lot of you know rhymes and songs and I had some problems with that because when you are kind of supposed to learn a language (.) that it becomes mechanical when it is kind of only through songs and jingles and rhymes because they will not have any meaning [to the child] that I have been more into their understanding what the words mean To her, ‘functional’ meant ‘becoming familiar [with Swedish] through everyday activities’ which led to the children coming round to ‘understanding what the words mean’ (the word ‘understanding’ phonologically stressed). Again, she expressed her doubts about using rhymes and songs as a means, because she found them too mechanical and thought that they did not make sense to the children. The quote also shows a time trajectory in which methods typical of language showers were the point of departure (‘to start with it was a lot of’), through a phase of questioning (‘but I had some problems’) to current practices (‘I have been more into’). Finally, the objective of the language shower activities, ‘to familiarise the children with Swedish’, shows that Johanna had only modest expectations for the children’s language learning. In the previous quotation, above, she expressed hesitation about the very concept of learning, at least when it comes to using rhymes and songs as a method. Whether the activities should just be about getting the children familiar with Swedish or whether they should go further so that they actually learnt the language became a subject of increased inner negotiation at a certain point in time. Johanna described a period after the language shower had been running for about two months when she experienced a sense of losing control over the situation. She said that many parents had started enthusiastically reporting to her about their children’s fast progress in producing some Swedish at home, and some parents had even asked if the language shower outcomes would mean that their children could enter a Swedish-medium school. The positive feedback led to the ECEC unit director encouraging Johanna to develop her methods to enhance the learning of Swedish even more, and these increased expectations at this stage caused her some stress. The quote below illustrates this process and also how she finally coped with the situation: but then they [=the children] got to know some Swedish so fast so then it was like ‘okay they understand what the word “mjölk” [=milk] means’ [---] (.) but also learning Swedish (.) but ‘we are not to make them bilinguals or Swedish-speakers’ that then kind of ‘hey (makes a clicking sound with her tongue) now get back here’ and that was a great relief when you got back on the ground again The quote richly represents the teacher’s inner speech and it illustrates the negotiation she had with herself about whether she should expand the initial modest goals of the language shower activities to include more ambitious ones: ‘okay they understand what the word “mjölk” means … but also learning Swedish’ (the latter phrase uttered with a questioning tone of voice and the word ‘learning’ stressed). Then, as it seems from her inner dialogue, a turning point occurred when she states: ‘but we are not to make them bilinguals or Swedish-speakers’. By the use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’, she reminded herself that the language goal set up by her and her superiors for the language shower activities was not to teach the Finnish children enough Swedish to become bilingual speakers or to prepare them for a Swedish-medium school. In uttering ‘hey now get back here’ she directed herself mentally to the more modest, original goals of the language shower activities. The end result of the negotiation with herself was a sense of relief, and the feeling that she was in control of the situation again. By reminding herself that the children were to continue in a Finnish-medium school – in contrast to the bilingual/Swedish-speaking children in her previous class in the Swedish-medium section, who were being prepared for a Swedish-medium school – she managed to adhere to the curriculum and the Finnish system of structural parallel monolingualism. We can notice here the ‘ethnification’ and explicit division of individuals into different language groups (‘Swedishspeakers’, ‘Finnish-speakers’, ‘bilinguals’ etc.) which are characteristic of the Finnish context (cf. Boyd and Palviainen 2015). The second objective recurring in her discourse was the shaping of positive language attitudes: and that thing about two languages on an equal footing (.) I think I have a vague intention somewhere in the back of my head (.) that the languages must not become negative that it should be more of a fun and positive thing that ‘oh one can speak like this as well’ that ‘there is something called Sweden and Swedish’ (.) to make a positive impact In this quote, we find a repetition of the discourse equality between languages (cf. previous section). Finnish and Swedish should be ‘on an equal footing’ and neither of them should be emphasised at the expense of the other. She wanted to raise the children’s awareness about the country Sweden and the language spoken there. In doing this, she used her personal historical body – brought up in Sweden in a Finnish-speaking family – as the frame of reference rather than Finland and the Swedish spoken by Swedish-speaking Finns. Johanna wanted to work against negative attitudes and instead promote languages (in the plural) as something ‘fun and positive’ and she wanted to ‘make a positive impact’. As discussed previously, some societal discourses on language learning in Finland – especially in connection with Swedish as a compulsory school subject for Finnish speakers – tend to throw up negative views, ‘compulsion’, ‘uselessness’ and ‘lack of motivation’. In the quote, Johanna stresses the words ‘negative’ and ‘positive’. This is an example of how broader social issues appear in the teacher’s discourse and how they serve as a driving force for her to aim for social change (Scollon and Scollon 2004). A closer analysis of the key concepts which appeared in Johanna’s discourses reveals that she generally discussed concepts as opposites (e.g. ‘languages must not become negative … it should be … a positive thing’; or languages as ‘equal’ in contrast to ‘unequal’). This was also true for her descriptions of her way of working, as we will see in the following section. Hence, to define to herself what she was doing, it seemed important to her to clarify what she was not doing. 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Supplementary file: Original teacher quotations Creating a Bilingual Pre-school Classroom: The Multilayered Discourses of a Bilingual Teacher Åsa Palviainen Karita Mård-Miettinen 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; extralinguistic information given within ( ); and ‘text within single quotation marks’ represent reported speech/thought. Launching the Language Showers nu ska vi baka pepparkakor väntas nu lite ja ska ta fram lite deg (.) laitetaas tuo tuonne odottamaan (.) ja veitset näitä veitsiä käyttää vaan aikuinen mihinkähän mä tarvin sitä veitsee? (.) odota tiedätkö? (något av barnen pratar) vänta jokainen saa leipoo ja saa leipoo ihan rauhassa mutta totaniin mäpäs kerron ensin miten me tehään tää homma (.) ja ska ta fram en kniv (tar en kniv i handen) och så skär ja lite här såhär (skär degen i bitar) okej väntas nu nu har ja två bitar ett å två å vi är ett två tre fyra barn (rör vid barnens huvud medan hon räknar) hyh nu gör ja såhär ett två tre å fyra (.) nu räcker det eller hur? The Language Separation Discourse å de här va nånting som jag hade jättestort problem med för att jag e liksom på de viset har alltid tänkt en person ett språk ett ställe ett språk alltså jag e liksom själv tvåspråkig jag har alltid talat svenska åt mina barn å jag har jobbat på svenskt dagis och jag har jobbat på språkbadsdagis så de så de ha varit helt här (.) så det här för mej att förstå det här är helt tillåtet (.) ja att jag hade så svårt [att förstå det] et varmaan mulla itellä oli alussa se että mä olin ite tavallaan ajatellu että on yks henkilö yksi kieli että miten mä voin puhua kahta kieltä kahta kieltä niin että eiks se luo hämmennystä tai tämmöstä näin mut sit mun pää saatiin käännettyä tuolta kieltenlaitokselta että ’tämän päivän lapsille se on hyvin tavallista että on ihminen joka voi puhua kahta tai peräti kolmee eri kieltä ja tehdä ittensä ymmärretyksi’ [---] se on ihan oikeesti toiminu niin, että ei se oo mitään ihmeellistä että mä puhun suomee ja ruotsia lasten mielestä [---] ’täähän onnistuu hyvänen aika näinkin (.) näinkin jos ajatellaan niinkun kielten oppimista’ men jag vet att tillåme i vårt hus så de e (.) [tycker kollegor] att ’näe (.) att nej ett språk liksom en människa’ egentligen märker jag liksom att jag tänker så att de är jämlika båda språken att dom liksom (.) att på svenska sidan hade man den där liksom att man försöker göra det där språket så aktivt som möjligt att man liksom (.) riktigt liksom försöker dra att det kommer liksom svenska svar men här är det liksom lugnt på den fronten att det är lika rätt (.) oberoende om du svarar på finska eller liksom svenska (.) å det där lugnet som man har själv liksom The Objectives Discourse det är liksom som den här määritelmä som vi hade tutustuminen ruotsin kieleen å inte bara att jag sjunger nån sång eller nån ramsa utan den här det är mera funktionellt de var ju målsättningarna vi hade tillsammans det var ju inte min målsättning men att de (.) ja alltså på dagissidan att chefen å sen hennes chef att det här att man fick börja med det här så ska man liksom ha en målsättning med de (.) men att den var lite diffus det var ju bra att den var mera sådär att tutustuminen arjenkeinoin men från början var det ju mycket så där loruja ja laulua å de hade jag lite svårt med att ska man liksom lära sig ett språk (.) att det blir mera mekaniskt att det är liksom bara via sånger å rim å ramsor att de får liksom inge innebörd att de jag har väl haft mer av de så där att de ska förstå va orden betyder men sen blev de ju så snabbt bekanta med svenskan så sen så blev det ju sådär att okej de förstår va ordet mjölk betyder [---] men att också liksom lära sig svenskan men vi e junte dom tvåspråkiga eller dom svenskspråkiga att just den liksom att ’hej (klickar med tungan) nu tillbaks hit’ å de lätta väldigt mycket det där när man sen kom ner på jorden på något sätt igen å just det där med två jämställda språk (.) ja tror jag har en liten sån tanke därbak (.) språken får inte bli en sån där negativ grej att de ska va mera en såndär rolig och positiv grej att ’åh, man kan prata så här också’ (.) att ’ de finns nåt som heter Sverige å svenska’ (.) att göra en sån här positiv inverkan i 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.