Award-winning! Smart Work 2025: Language Awareness Cards

Materials that support language learning broadly contribute to the goals of the Child-Friendly Hämeenlinna programme.

Hämeenlinna is constantly becoming more diverse, and the operating environment in early childhood education and care is also becoming more diverse and multilingual. In a Child-Friendly Hämeenlinna, an important task of early childhood education is to guarantee all children and families consistent and equal education, where every child feels included and equal to everyone else.

The purpose of the Language Awareness Cards is to challenge staff to evaluate their own actions and the learning environment from the perspective of equality and child participation, using questions such as the following:

• How do we create an interactive atmosphere where everyone is heard and accepted?
• What kind of opportunities for participation do we offer children regardless of their language skills?
• How can we modify our operating culture so that every child is heard and seen as themselves and with their own skills, and feels they belong to the group as a full member?
• What kind of linguistic models do we offer the child?
• Is our operating culture sufficiently language-aware and rich in modeling language so that the Finnish language can develop in the best possible way?

In language-aware early childhood education and care, it is recognised that languages are present constantly and everywhere. Staff understand the central importance of language in children’s development and learning, interaction and cooperation, as well as in the construction of identities and belonging to society. Making multilingualism visible supports children’s development in a culturally diverse world. Staff must be aware that they are linguistic models for children and pay attention to their own use of language. Staff encourage children to use language in diverse ways. Children’s linguistic backgrounds are taken into account, and they are given time and opportunities for varied language use situations. (National Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care 2022)

Goal-oriented and systematic self-evaluation by staff plays a key role in maintaining and developing the quality of early childhood education and care. The object of evaluation can include, among other things, staff interaction with children, the atmosphere in the group, pedagogical methods, the content of activities, or learning environments. (National Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care 2022)

The Language Awareness Cards support the evaluation and development of language-aware early childhood education and care.

Is the innovation replicable within the city or elsewhere?

In Hämeenlinna’s early childhood education and care, special emphasis is placed on the theme of language, culture, and worldview education, where one focus area is the implementation of the KieliPeda tool for use by all early childhood education staff when evaluating and developing a language-aware learning environment.

In connection with this, training sessions on language awareness and the implementation of the KieliPeda tool were organised for staff in spring 2024. The Language Awareness Cards, designed to serve as support material for the KieliPeda tool, were also presented during the training. The cards can be used to support discussions, reflections, and the sharing of ideas within early childhood education teams as they evaluate and develop a language-aware learning environment using the KieliPeda tool.

The cards can be laminated to be double-sided, with a question on one side and ideas for language-aware practices on the other. The intention is to first reflect on what kind of language-aware practices are already in use and which ones could still be adopted and developed. By looking at the reverse side of the card, teams can get additional ideas and also receive confirmation of the language-aware practices already in place.

The cards are in use in every early childhood education unit in Hämeenlinna and can be found on the Hämeenlinnan väkeä intranet. In addition, the cards were presented at the national Early Childhood Education Days in May 2024 and are also available in the Finnish National Agency for Education’s Library of Open Educational Resources.

There is no measured evidence yet on the effectiveness of the Language Awareness Cards, but their benefits have been observed in everyday work. A lot of positive feedback has been received: they have increased staff awareness of language- and culture-aware early childhood education and provided concrete ideas and models for language-aware practices in daily routines. Positive feedback has also come from other municipalities where the cards have been adopted.

The cards were also presented at a regional meeting of consulting special education teachers in early childhood education – they sparked a lot of interest among the experts and received excellent feedback.

Developers

Tarja Toivola-Haavisto, Early Childhood Education Teacher
Marjo Oksanen, Early Childhood Education Teacher