Session Information
31 SES 04 A, Effectiveness of Multilingual Education Programmes on (Academic) Language Proficiency, Home Literacies and Teacher Perspectives
Symposium
Contribution
The Children’s linguistic development is determined by a range of different factors, the family being of central importance (Baumert et al., 2006). Through it, a child receives linguistic input and socialization in reading and writing (literacy). So-called home literacy activities have special potential concerning children‘s language skills. A number of studies detected direct as well as indirect effects on (academic) language skills that significantly determine the children‘s successful academic performance (Senechal et al., 2002; Leseman et al., 2007). Whereas those studies mainly concentrated on monolingual children (in elementary school), studies focussing on children growing up bilingually remain a desideratum (cf. Scheele 2010). Yet, home literacy activities seem to be particularly complex in multilingual families, and correlations between literacy activities and language skills can be found in regard to the different languages in use as well as concerning transfer effects (Leseman et al., 2009, Scheele, 2010). While home literacy activities are performed within the family context, there are also programmes targeted at stimulating those activities. One of these programmes is “Rucksack Schule” which, apart from the building block of “Parental Education – Literacy”, aims to further children’s language skills. The present study is based on the data gathered in the above-mentioned project. It concentrates on bilingual practices in Turkish-German families. The first step focusses on the question: “How are home literacy activities shaped in the family? To what extent and in which language are they performed?” The second step examines the relation between these home literacy activities and the children’s language skills in Turkish and German. The sample comprises 52 children at the end of primary school, between eight and eleven years of age. While the description of bilingual literacy practice will take place in a descriptive format, regression analysis will be employed to research correlations. Apart from essential contextual factors such as socio-economic status and cultural capital, I controlled for the participation in the “Rucksack Schule” programme. I expect to see results that indicate that home literacy activities in the families are conducted bilingually and that parents taking part in the programme conduct these activities more frequently than parents who do not take part in it. I assume there are positive correlations between the conducting of home literacy activities and children’s (academic) language skills in both languages, and I hypothesise that participation in “Rucksack Schule” may exert (positive) influence over this.
References
Baumert, J., Stanat, P. & Watermann, R. (2006). Herkunftsbedingte Disparitäten im Bildungswesen: Differenzielle Bildungsprozesse und Probleme der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit. Vertiefende Analysen im Rahmen von Pisa 2000. Wiesbaden: VS. Leseman, P. P. M., Scheele, A. F., Mayo, A. Y., & Messer, H. (2007). Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment to Prepare Children for School. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 10(3), 334-355. Leseman, P. P. M., Scheele, A. F., Mayo, A. Y., & Messer, M. H. (2009). Bilingual development in early childhood and the languages used at home: competition for scare re-sources? In I. Gogolin & U. Neumann (Eds.). Streitfall Zweisprachigkeit – The Bilingualism Controversy (pp. 289-317). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Scheele, A. F. (2010). Home language and mono- and bilingual children’s emergent academic language: A longitudinal study of Dutch, Moroccan-Dutch, and Turkish-Dutch 3- to 6-year-olds. Enschede, Netherlands: Ipskamp Drukkers. Senechal, M., & LeFevre, J.-A. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children’s reading skill: A five-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 73(2), 445-460.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.