“You have to choose your words wisely”: Finnish pre-service teachers’ understandings of, and support for, multilingual students’ academic language development

The aim of this study was to examine Finnish pre-service primary school teachers’ (n = 92) understandings of academic language development and self-reported preparedness to support language learning when teaching multilingual students (MLSs) in Finnish primary schools. Data were gathered with a survey and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicated that the pre-service teachers had somewhat good understanding of language learning, and reported skills to support academic language development, but there were gaps in awareness of how to provide linguistic support for MLSs and how to use L1s as learning resources. Moreover, there were considerable gaps in the pre-service teachers’ grammar knowledge and one-third of them did not see a connection between language and mathematical problem-solving skills. The results lead us to conclude that the pre-service teachers’ awareness of linguistically responsive teaching is still developing. Thus, providing pre-service teachers with research-based and practice-oriented instruction for deepening their knowledge of how to support academic language development in all subjects is needed.