Programme

Sari Pöyhönen | (Centre for Applied Languages, University of Jyvaskyla) | Official bilingualism in Finland - ideologies and tensions

Bilingual Finland has an international reputation as something of a model country with well-functioning bilingual legislation and practices. This, however, is only one side of the issue. The position of Swedish in Finland has been topic of more or less heated debates both historically and contemporarily, and during the first decade of the 2000s, social media has brought these debates to the national attention in a new way. On one hand, the position of Swedish as a compulsory subject in comprehensive school is under debate; on the other, the rights of the Swedish speaking population to receive official administrative services in Swedish seems to be compromised in some regions and administrative sectors due to the lack of Swedish skills by local authorities. The most recent public debates have focused around the issue of bilingual schools: according to Finnish education legislation, bilingually Finnish-Swedish schools are not allowed. This debate has once again made visible the precarious balance and emerging tensions between official and individual bilingualism in Finland. In my presentation, I will shed light to the ideologies and tensions concerning official bilingualism in Finland.

Sari Pöyhönen is Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Applied Languages at the University of Jyvaskyla, with expertise in researching identities and school ethnography. Topics that she has investigated so far include the professional identity of Finnish language teachers in Russia, ethnic and linguistic identities of Ingrian teachers, and pedagogical cultures in transition. In this project, she focuses on the ways in which immigrant pupils construct and manifest their identities in both out-of-school and in-school literacy practices.

Paulo Feytor Pinto | (Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal) | Portuguese Sign Language (LGP) – practice and research

For the last few decades, studies about Língua Gestual Portuguesa (LGP) have been shifting from a pathological deficit approach to a rather sociolinguistic paradigm. This brief presentation will first outline the repertoires of LGP users and LGP language planning activity (status, corpus, education) since 1980. The second part will focus on two research areas related to literacy for LGP users: reading and writing in an oral language (L2) and writing scripts for sign languages (L1).

Paulo Feytor Pinto holds a doctoral degree in Portuguese Studies by the Open University (Universidade Aberta), is Assistant Professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Setúbal and former President of the Association of Teachers of Portuguese. He has published extensively in language policies, linguistic and cultural diversity and the teaching and learning of Portuguese.