Multilingualism in Swedish-Medium Teacher Education in Finland. DLCs in the Light of Teacher Educators’ Institutional Constellation Charts and the Institutional Linguistic Landscape

The aim of this study is to investigate institutional DLC(s) of a Swedish-medium teacher education campus in Finland through the linguistic landscape and three teacher educators’ constellation charts and reasoning, as a representation of the ‘de facto’ institutional language policy and potential space for multilingual language development. The context is Åbo Akademi University, which offers ITE at all levels for Swedish-medium schools in Finland for Swedish-speaking, Finnish-dominant and international student teachers. The results reveal a linguistic landscape containing a wide variety of languages, including the two national languages Swedish and Finnish, English and examples of several other foreign languages. There is a consistent focus on Swedish, sometimes in combination with one or more language/s used for different functions. Fewer languages are identified by the teacher educators, indicating that not all languages in the linguistic landscape are noticed. The results show a fairly static linguistic landscape, dominated by Swedish, with English and Finnish as part of the DLC, and suggest that a more consistently linguistically inclusive environment could be reached by including students’ pieces of work and actual languages in the linguistic landscape and teaching activities.