Session Information
31 SES 10, Understanding Home Language Use in Multilingual Families and its Implications for Education Research
Symposium
Contribution
This presentation introduces the longitudinal study “Mehrsprachigkeitsentwicklung im Zeitverlauf” (MEZ; Multilingual development: A longitudinal perspective), which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research from November 2014 to September 2019. This interdisciplinary study follows two parallel cohorts of mono- and multilingual students in classes 7 and 9 through to the end of classes 9 and 11 respectively and aims at investigating the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that positively or negatively influence individuals’ multilingual development as well as the effects these factors thereby have on further dimensions of educational success (for example, on educational belief-formation and decision-making processes and actual transitions in the educational system). The initial sample will include approximately 1,800 students with German-Turkish, German-Russian, and monolingual German language backgrounds from public schools in Hamburg, Bremen, and Schleswig-Holstein. Data collection is carried out in four phases and starts in October 2015. The study assesses both the participants’ receptive skills (reading and listening) and productive skills (written and oral) in German as well as in the heritage languages Russian and Turkish and, where applicable, in the school-taught foreign languages English, French, and Russian. Also, a questionnaire for both students and their parents is used to collect information on personal and contextual influences of students’ multilingual development. The present contribution focuses on the explanation of the relation that has been identified between students’ home language use and different dimensions of educational success (e.g., Klieme 2010). On the one hand, MEZ departs from the conventional approach of merely assessing the language(s) that is (are) used most often in the family and builds on research that has shown that these operationalizations are not suitable to capture the complexity of multilingual language practices, for example due to variations in students’ home language use depending on the communication situation and the type of literacy activities that are carried out (Ilić 2015). On the other hand, the longitudinal design of the study provides new opportunities for data analyses by allowing to observe changes in these patterns over time and to address questions of causal inference. Adopting a resource-oriented perspective, MEZ specifically aims at identifying the finer mediating processes though which the use of the home language(s) influences different dimensions of educational success in order to identify the conditions that need to be met for multilingual language practices to have a positive effect on students’ educational success.
References
Ilić, V. (2015). Familiale Lernumwelt von Jugendlichen mit und ohne Migrationshintergrund: Eine empirische Studie zum Zusammenhang zwischen home-literacy-Aktivitäten und bildungssprachlichen Fähigkeiten. Leverkusen: Budrich Uni Press. Klieme, Eckhard, Cordula Artelt, Johannes Hartig, Nina Jude, Olaf Köller, Manfred Prenzel, Wolfgang Schneider and Petra Stanat (2010). PISA 2009: Bilanz nach einem Jahrzehnt. Münster: Waxmann.
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