After rising numbers of international immigrants in European countries including Finland since 2015, both receiving societies and immigrants have faced different challenges of integration. Education is one main factor influencing decisively immigrant’s and in particular immigrant children’s integration into receiving societies. And undoubtedly, parents play a key role in their children’s success in education and later life. In consequence, in order to support immigrant children during their, in most cases, first encountered challenge in the receiving society’s educational system of learning a new language, a close cooperation between schools, teachers, and parents is required. In this regard, parent-teacher collaboration strategies are not only beneficial for immigrant children’s acquisition of a new language but allow parents at the same time to be involved in their children’s education and assist teachers in their work. This research focuses on the existing positive and challenging experiences that Arabic-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking immigrant children aged 7 to 13 made with learning the Finnish language after the first year of their preparatory course in Finland. For that, an overall bottom-up methodological approach was pursued, based on major theories on parental involvement and on second language acquisition as the theoretical framework as well as by applying qualitative narrative research methods. This included the gathering of narratives in the form of semi-structured interviews with 23 immigrant Arabic-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking children and their parents and 4 Finnish teachers. The results of the thematic narrative analysis illustrate that even though the currently applied parent-teacher collaboration are very beneficial for immigrant children’s education, they are struggling to cope with challenges related to the growing numbers of pupils with varying educational and cultural backgrounds at Finnish schools. In consequence, solutions to these challenges such as closer parent-teacher communication channels should be incorporated into the present parent-teacher collaboration to foster immigrant children’s Finnish language acquisition and to pave by that the way to a more successful and thriving school life.
Related Studies
“Without language you can’t do anything.” How can the education of newly arrived immigrant students in Berlin be improved?
Due to an increased number of newly arrived immigrant students the federal state Berlin established German language classes, that mainly focus on German language learning in order to prepare the students for their transfer to a mainstream…
Educators’ perspectives on translanguaging schoolscape and language education for refugee students in Greek educational settings
The past and current situation in Greece regarding the refugee crisis has created educators’ need to apply new educational strategies to address refugee students, such as the use of translanguaging, linguistic landscape and schoolscape as…