Pedagogical multidisciplinary studies in Finnish language and literature prepare student teachers to teach Finnish language and literature in grades 1 to 6 (age 7-13) of basic education and in preschool. In addition, they offer the capacity to teach other school subjects using a language aware approach and also to take into account the needs of multilingual learners in different subjects and to utilise their multilingual resources.

In Step 4, language and language use are examined for example from the following perspectives:

• Pupils’ (multilingual) language environments and linguistic identity development

• Differentiation of language use features in different situations and text types

• Language resources of pupils in writing

• Interpretation of Finnish language structures in textbook exercises

• Linguistic features of the texts of different subjects

• Integration of different subjects into Finnish language teaching

• Developing language awareness through literature

• Conceptualisation of linguistic phenomena

The starting point for the studies is the use of pupils’ own textual and linguistic environments. The material includes spoken, written and visual multimodal texts. Activities that develop language aware pedagogy are included in the module tasks and exam assignments and are also discussed in small group sessions.

Language aware teaching in other subjects is seen as a tool to support the equal participation and agency of all learners. The studies explore ways to support multilingual and multicultural learners in school and in mainstream education. The main source material is the On a journey with a multilingual student! website (https://monikielisenoppijanmatkassa.fi/materials-in-english/).