Becoming a multilingual health professional in vocational education – two adult migrants’ translanguaging trajectories

Lecture by Maiju Strömmer, Jyväskylä (Finland).

Abstract

In Finland, the amount of migrant students in vocational education is increasing. Their educational backgrounds, language repertoires and prior knowledge are diverse, and research is needed to gain understanding on how their prior knowledge and multilingual resources could be acknowledged, supported and deployed for field-specific (language) learning. To contribute to this effort, we draw on theoretical approaches of translanguaging and language architecture (García & Kleyn 2016; Li 2018; Flores 2020). Both concepts challenge the rigid boundaries between different languages and dismantle the hierarchies between the academic language and learners’ existing language resources. Thus, the concepts promote the integration of student’s multilingual resources in the content studies.

This ethnographic study focuses on two multilingual students studying the vocational qualification in social and health care. Small stories analysis (Georgakopoulou 2015) is applied to analyse their translanguaging trajectories while becoming multilingual health professionals. The data consists of ethnographic observations, interviews, and audio-recorded interactions conducted in the nursing programme in vocational education. The official language of instruction is Finnish, but the students are encouraged to integrate their multilingual resources for their vocational development. The analysis illustrates how translanguaging not only deepens the multilingual students’ understanding of field-specific content but also enables them to strategically use and strengthen their multilingual resources and become independent Finnish language users.

The study is part of a research project “Building Blocks: Developing second language resources for working life” (University of Jyväskylä, PI: professor Minna Suni, funded by Academy of Finland). This interdisciplinary project explores the Finnish language resources needed and developed by adult immigrants whose aim is to get employed in their own field in Finland.

References

Flores, N. 2020. From academic language to language architecture: Challenging raciolinguistic ideologies in research and practice. Theory Into Practice, 59:1, 22-31.

García, O. & Kleyn, T. 2016. Translanguaging theory in education. In García & Kleyn (Eds.) Translanguaging with multilingual students: learning from classroom moments. New York, London: Routledge, pp. 9-33.

Georgakopoulou, A. 2015. Small Stories Research: Methods – analysis – outreach. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Wiley Blackwell, pp. 255-271.

Li, W. 2018. Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics, 39 (1), 9-30.