Teaching on undergraduate level.

My research interests include sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, language policy, nexus analysis as well as critical discourse analysis.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Peer interaction practices as part of a Sweden Finnish spatial repertoire

  2022. Lasse Vuorsola. Linguistics and Education 67, 101014-101014

  Article

  Canagarajah's (2018) notion spatial orientation presupposes that communication is the sum of semiotic resources being used in a material ecology by a social network. This collaboratively facilitated way of meaning making forms a spatial repertoire. Based on these tenets, the current study focuses on the social network and its role when a group of Sweden Finnish minority pupils with varying linguistic proficiencies interact during Finnish class in a bilingual Sweden Finnish school. The study proposes the term peer interaction practice (PIP) to describe the mechanism of variable peer interactions. The study uses appraisal as a method for identifying PIPs in class room observations.

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• Minority positioning in physical and online spaces

  2020. Lasse Vuorsola. Linguistic Landscape 6 (3), 297-325

  Article

  The study examines how a Sweden Finnish minority language activist group positions themselves by inserting graffiti-like stickers into the Swedish Linguistic Landscape, and how the majority populations in Sweden and Finland react to these revitalisation efforts. Protesting by placing stickers in physical environments is classified as an act of linguistic citizenship (Isin 2009) and, from the majority’s point of view, these acts are a threat to the shared cultural moral order. The data consists of pictures posted on Instagram that depict actual physical environments where activists have placed stickers that encourage the minority to “speak their own language”. The activists utilise temporal, spatial, textual, and multimodal elements in their discursive construction. As a theoretical framework, I apply Harré and Langehove’s (1991) positioning theory. The results show how minorities position themselves in relation to the Swedish majority population with the aim of justifying their status and their right to exist.

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• Societal support for the educational provisions of Finnish in the Swedish school system in theory and practice

  2019. Lasse Vuorsola. Language Policy 18 (3), 363-385

  Article

  Language policy has an impact both on societies and on individuals, especially in contexts where negative ideologies toward minorities and minority languages may exist. A functional language policy protects a minority and allows it to develop its culture and language, while an ineffective policy might cause irreparable damage and lead to language attrition and even complete loss of language. The development of Finnish in Sweden from a language policy perspective has been fairly positive since the mid-1990s, especially when it comes to the establishment and strengthening of the legal and regulatory support in international conventions and domestic legislation. Despite these improvements there have been practical negative developments, which are symbolised in the closing down of a bilingual independent school in Gothenburg in 2016. The closing of the schools signal opposing tendencies in the treatment of Finnish in Sweden. In this paper I will examine how supranational and national language policies are implemented locally in Gothenburg and how this implementation reveals how well the policies function and what role ideologies play in the implementation. I discuss how different levels of policymaking and application contribute to the current status of the Sweden Finnish minority and Sweden Finnish as a minority language by employing Richard Ruiz’s three orientations to language planning (Ruiz 1984; Hult and Hornberger 2016) in tandem with Irvine & Gal’s concept of erasure and critical discourse analysis. I exemplify how the language policies work by studying interviews and media reporting from the field. I examine how the different discourses are in conflict with each other and what ramifications these discrepancies result in.

  Read more about Societal support for the educational provisions of Finnish in the Swedish school system in theory and practice

Show all publications by Lasse Vuorsola at Stockholm University