How Finnish teachers select diverse materials to support immigrant preparatory education

Building on prior research indicating that the native-immigrant achievement gap in Finland is tied to language proficiency and an absence of suitable multilingual teaching resources, this study qualitatively investigates how preparatory education teachers select materials. Preparatory education is meant to support integration into mainstream classrooms through language education. Using grounded theory, this article inductively analyzed nine semi-structured interviews with teachers from Finnish- and Swedish-language schools. Three themes emerged: (1) non-linear topic selection to support class basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) development; (2) needs-based selection to support individual cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) development; and (3) timed selection to support epistemic skill development. Research questions were iteratively refined to align with these themes, structuring an analysis of how teachers select second language and mainstream subject materials to compensate for missing multilingual resources. Findings suggest that multilingual materials aligned with current teaching practices could strengthen mainstream classroom integration outcomes.