Migration and flight pose a challenge to the self-conception of the German nation. Although in reality linguistically, culturally and religiously heterogeneous, Germany historically did not see herself as an immigrant country. At the peak of recent refugee movement in Europe (2017), 1.4 million refugees and asylum seekers came to Germany (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2018), 2.5 % of them were distributed to the city-state of Hamburg. Refugee and newly migrated students attend so-called “international preparation classes” to learn German as a second language (and/or the Latin alphabet) for up to one year before they are mainstreamed. In the “regular” classroom, their success is dependent upon teachers who have an understanding of how to teach language while teaching content. However, the majority of teachers do not feel well prepared for this content-based language-teaching (Becker-Mrotzek, Hentschel, Hippmann, & Linnemann, 2012). For this country perspective we share the Professional teachers´ Actions to promote subject-based Learning under changing social conditions (the ProfaLe study). To support future teachers’ competencies for dealing with linguistic and cultural diversity in content teaching, university faculty at the Hamburg University developed two seminars on migration, multilingualism and content-based language and taught collaboratively in a module on school internships in the pre-service teachers Master Program (Schroedler & Lengyel, 2018). Drawing on the critical-reflexive language awareness frame (Tajmel, 2017) the students (n=296) learned about how to work with multilinguals (including refugee children) through a locally developed online module and a course to accompany a teaching practicum. Their learning about the teaching of German as a Second Language in the (content) classroom was measured through DaZKom, a standardized test (Ehmke, Hammer, Köker, Ohm, Koch-Priewe, 2018), questionnaires on Opportunities to Learn (OTL), personal background data and professional beliefs about multilingualism and learning. Findings show a significant increase in the students’ competence. OTL in the field of linguistic diversity help the pre-service teachers to become more sensitive towards the OTL and benefit from them. The youngest generation of teachers appears to be most open-minded when it comes to linguistic and cultural diversity (Schroedler & Fischer 2020). However, will these ‘positive’ beliefs will outlast the move from pre-service to in-service teaching? Nevertheless, the cross-disciplinary development of new learning opportunities in pre-service teacher education shows promise for providing the basics and principles of content-based language teaching in the linguistically and culturally diverse mainstream classrooms which contain students who are recent refugees.

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