The Japanese new national core curriculum for basic education started in 2020, in which foreign language education is introduced in the third year of schooling. Echoing to this movement, there are pressing needs to educate teachers who can teach a foreign language to young children and to start language learning as early as in kindergarten. The aim of this study is to investigate foreign language education and teacher training for it in Finland, the country where many of the people can speak several foreign languages. Especially, this study focuses on one teacher training program in Finland that aims to educate classroom teachers to teach English as a foreign language. The findings indicated that the program is carefully organized to promote students’ intelligent thinking and professional identity, which further reinforce their teacher agency. The courses emphasize more on diversity and multicultural and multilingual education rather than how to teach English. The findings would be beneficial for developing foreign language education and teacher training in Japan.
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