Language awareness is a key consideration in each of the teaching practices. Teaching Practice 1 raises language awareness by observing the multilingualism and language aware practices of the school. This provides concrete examples of what language awareness means in the classroom and in school life and what language-based tools the teacher can use to support learning, participation and understanding. Language awareness is also the theme of one of the Teaching Practice 1 Video Clubs, which aims at supporting the development of classroom interaction observation skills.

Texts, tasks and tools:

• Language aware classroom observations (Listiac).pdf​

• Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education 2014, esp. Section 3.3

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The development of language awareness is part of teacher development, which is reflected on, explored and described in ProTeacher – an online personal-professional portfolio of student teacher development. On the Language Aware Pathway, the ProTeacher reflection tasks are linked with the Teaching Practices 1-4. During each teaching practice, students reflect on their skills and abilities with the help of selected questions related to the core competencies of teacher education at JYU.

ProTeacher1 Questions:

Ethical competence

· What kinds of ethical choices can (or did) a lesson involve? What ethical choices can be connected with different subjects, or the working culture of the school?

Interaction skills and diversity-related competence:

· What kinds of diversity do I recognise in myself and in others, such as different identities and the elements that constitute them, and how does this show in my thinking and actions?

Pedagogical competence:

· How can the teacher support and guide the class atmosphere so that difference is recognised and respectfully appreciated, enabling pupils to care and look out for one another?

 

Using these ProTeacher questions, consider how your understanding of language aware and multilingual pedagogy has evolved.