Synopsis:

This volume presents studies on aspects of teacher education that prepare teachers for working in linguistically diverse classrooms and schools in five Nordic countries; Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. This twin focus (teacher education in linguistically diverse contexts; and Nordic perspectives) makes the volume unique in its field, and contributes to international discussions on how teacher education can prepare preservice and in-service teachers for working with linguistically diverse student groups.

The volume includes contributions on:

Teacher education policies

Teacher educators’ perspectives on teacher education

Pre-service teacher perspectives on teacher education.

The ways in which teacher education prepares educators for working with newcomers and multilingual students has attracted considerable attention in recent years. This reflects the increasingly linguistically diverse nature of classrooms that teachers around the world meet, that is in turn, a direct result of intensified globalisation and transnational migration. Clearly, teacher education is crucial for successful implementation of educational provisions for multilingual students. Teacher knowledge, gained partly through teacher education, plays a central role in creating educational environments where multilingual students can thrive.

This volume focuses specifically on teacher education in a Nordic context, a region traditionally associated with progressive approaches in education based on principles of inclusivity, social justice and equal opportunity. In the twenty-first century, most Nordic countries have experienced increasing levels of migration. While neither multilingualism nor transnational migration are new phenomena in the region, geographical and social factors, as well as the ways humans communicate have helped make multilingualism more visible in the twenty-first century. Schools in the Nordic countries have had to act quickly and think flexibly to meet the needs of an increasingly linguistically and culturally heterogenous group of students. The ability of the Nordic countries to provide these students with “inclusive, equal education and a fair chance to start a new life” constitutes in some ways the ultimate test of the “Nordic model” of education. Investigating how this challenge is addressed in different forms of teacher education is the topic to which this volume turns its attention.

Synopsis:

This collective volume breaks new ground in studies of linguistic complexity by addressing this phenomenon in heritage languages. It dismisses with the conception that heritage languages are less complex than their baseline or homeland counterparts and shows complexity trade-offs at various levels of linguistic representation. The authors consider defining properties of complexity as a phenomenon, diagnostics of complexity, and the ways complexity is modeled, measured, or operationalized in language sciences. The chapters showcase several bilingual dyads and offer new empirical data on heritage language production and use.

Synopsis:

This volume explores and addresses questions related to equitable access for assessment. It seeks to initiate a conversation among scholars about inclusive practices in language assessments. Whether the student is a second language learner, a heritage language learner, a multilingual language speaker, a community member, the authors in the present volume provide examples of assessment that do not follow a single universal or standardized design but an applicable one based on the needs and context of a given community. The contributors in this volume are scholars from different disciplines and contexts in Higher Education. They have created and proposed multiple lower-stakes assignments and accommodated learning by being flexible and open without assuming that learners know how to do specific tasks. Each chapter provides different examples on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) assessment practices based on observation, examination, and integrative notions of diverse language scenarios. It may be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of curriculum and instruction, language learning, and applied linguistics as well as those in the field of language teaching in general. Thus this volume broadens the scope of research in the area of multilingual assessment.

This monograph is intended as a contribution to the field of bilingualism from a generative syntax perspective at a variety of levels. It investigates code-switching between Korean and English and also between Japanese and English, which exhibit several interesting features. Due to their canonical word order differences, Korean and Japanese being SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and English SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), a code-switched sentence between Korean/Japanese and English can take, in principle, either OV or VO order, to which little attention has been paid in the literature. On the contrary, word order is one of the most extensively discussed topics in generative syntax, especially in the Principles and Parameter’s approach (P&P) where various proposals have been made to account of various order patterns of different languages. By taking the generative view that linguistic variation is due to variation in the domain of functional categories rather than lexical roots (e.g. Borer 1984; Chomsky 1995), this monograph investigates word order variation in Korean-English and Japanese-English code-switching, with particular attention to the relative placement of the predicate (verb) and its complement (object) in two contrasting word orders, OV and VO, which was tested against Korean-English and Japanese-English bilingual speakers’ introspective judgments. The results provide strong evidence indicating that the distinction between functional and lexical verbs plays a major role in deriving different word orders (OV and VO, respectively) in Korean-English and Japanese-English code-switching, which supports the hypothesis that parametric variation is attributed to differences in the features of a functional category in the lexicon, as assumed in minimalist syntax. In particular, the explanation pursued in this monograph is based on feature inheritance, a syntactic derivational process, which was proposed in recent developments the Minimalist Program. The monograph shows that by studying diverse and creative word order patterns of code-switching, we are at a better disposal to understand how languages are parameterized similarly or differently in a given domain, which is the very topic that generative linguists have pursued for a long time.