Abstract:

Recruiting international talents and integrating them to the society has developed into one of the main drivers of solving the labor shortage in Finland. Ministry funded project, Talent Boost, has been initiated to support this development and one of the sub-projects is called Kielibuusti (Language Boost). The project will be carried out in 2021-2024 and is coordinated by Aalto University and Helsinki University. Kielibuusti is especially focused on learning national languages, as competence of the local language is a very crucial key to integration. Teaching of national languages, Finnish and Swedish, will be developed to make it a better match for the language proficiency needs of international experts to be or already recruited into Finland.

In Finland there are multiple services for immigrants and the operators working them but the field of services is quite fragmented. Especially in the case of a language learner with high education language learning paths are not clear and finding the way strongly depends on the learner’s own motivation and skills. One of the most important aims of Kielibuusti project is to create a one-stop service that provides the content for both the highly educated language learners and for all the entities supporting them in the language learning. In practice this is going to be achieved by gathering information about the needs of various operators in the field and creating an online portal that will work as a one-stop service with content to different target groups

In this presentation I will focus on the Kielibuusti online portal. I will introduce some principles on creating the online portal and the definitions of the three target groups of the site. The main idea is to provide content for the learner himself, but also for the teacher or the instructor of the language. The third target group includes all other operators who are not language professionals, but who can help or guide the language learner in higher education, work community or career service. In particular, the inclusion of these non-language professionals in the immigrant’s language learning path, requires extensive networking, not only in the phase of producing the portal’s content but in marketing it to the stakeholders.

The online portal will provide, based on a home page selection, target group specific content. On the learner’s site, there will be for example learning material, course search engine and digital tools for learning. On the teacher’s/instructor’s site there will be for instance teaching material and pedagogical models. On the site for work communities/career services the focus is in models and paths of supporting language learning at work or other immediate communities. Some contents are provided for several target groups, but in many cases from a different perspective. The idea is that useful materials can be found, utilized and shared by several operators. In this way, supporting language learning as a part of integration is raised as a common issue, where different operators have their own roles.

Keywords:

Immigration, integration, language learning path, supporting language learning, digital learning material, higher education, work communities.