Session Information
31 SES 08 A, Preparing Pre-service Teachers for Multilingual Classrooms – Differing Approaches from Europe and Beyond
Symposium
Contribution
Similar to other European contexts, Germany has seen an ever increasing level of societal linguistic diversity. Mostly as a result of migration for political or economic reasons, Germany has become a highly multilingual country. In a development that can be observed elsewhere, too, it is mostly the urban areas that attract more migrants than rural parts of the country. In Hamburg for instance over 40% of families use languages other than German in the home (IfBQ 2018). A challenge that arises from this situation is that multilingual children or children with a migrant background repeatedly attain lower educational success (Meier-Braun & Weber 2013). Education policy documents have thus long recommended to prepare teachers for working with multilingual students (Baumann 2017). Since the policy area of education in the Federal Republic of Germany, which includes teacher training, is almost exclusively a responsibility of the federal states (Länder), the approaches to preparing pre-service teachers for multilingual classroom realities differ substantially. This paper presents and compares three selected approaches from three different federal states (Hamburg, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia [NRW]). The approaches represent a continuum of measures reaching from a) an obligation for all teacher students to take courses on issues related to German as a second language (GSL) and multilingualism with a minimum requirement of one lecture and one seminar (NRW); b) no obligation but a wide range of offered courses on GSL, multilingualism and heterogeneity in different modules, so that is likely that many pre-service teachers are trained for working in multilingual classroom contexts (Hamburg) and c) an optional offer of courses on GSL and multilingualism that reaches those pre-service teachers that have an interest in the topic (Lower Saxony). In the final part of the paper, some selected strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches will be addressed and critically evaluated. Conclusively, it will be pointed out that a wide range of measures have been implemented across Germany. Yet, there is little empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such courses and programmes (Stangen et al. 2019), and a nationwide, structural approach for Germany in training pre-service teachers to work with multilingualism does not yet exist (Lütke 2017).
References
Baumann, B. (2017). Sprachförderung und Deutsch als Zweitsprache in der Lehrerbildung – ein deutschlandweiter Überblick. In Becker-Mrotzek, M. Rosenberg, P., Schroeder, C. & Witte, A. (eds) Deutsch als Zweitsprache in der Lehrerbildung. Münster: Waxmann. IfBQ (2018). Das Verfahren zur Vorstellung Viereinhalbjähriger. Ergebnisse Schuljahr 2017/2018. Hamburg. https://www.hamburg.de/bsb/monitoring-evaluation-diagnoseverfahren/4025966/artikel-vorstellung-4-5-jaehrigen/ (22.01.2019). Lütke, B. (2017) Deutsch als Zweitsprache-Module im Lehramtsstudium: Entwicklung, Relevanz und curriculare Konzepte. In Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen 46 (1), 27–42. Meier-Braun, K.-H. & Weber, R. (eds) (2013) Deutschland Einwanderungsland. Begriffe - Fakten - Kontroversen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Stangen, I., Schroedler, T. & Lengyel, D. (2019, in print). Kompetenzentwicklung für den Umgang mit Deutsch als Zweitsprache und Mehrsprachigkeit im Fachunterricht: Lerngelegenheiten und Kompetenzmessung in der Lehrer(innen)bildung. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft.
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