Multilingualism is the norm in most European countries. Especially in urban areas large proportions of student populations grow up with other first languages than the majority language (Extra/Yaĝmur 2004, Bühler-Otten/Fürstenau 2004). Data from school effectiveness research prove that European school systems – and the German school system to a greater extent than others – are far from providing equal opportunities for pupils with an immigration background and from linguistic minorities. The question of how to improve language teaching in the context of linguistic und socio-cultural diversity is one of the important issues discussed in German as well as in European education policy and research.

In Germany there is a long tradition of providing remedial programmes for students with German as a second language in separative classes. More radical programmes to mainstream supportive and inclusive language teaching in regular classrooms with students from diverse linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds (cf. Bourne 2003, Gibbons 2002) are still a challenge for the future in German schools as well as in teacher training. 

The paper presents a research project of the University of Muenster in cooperation with the Institute for Teacher Training and School Development in Hamburg. The project is carried out in inner city schools with high percentages of pupils from immigrant families and linguistic minorities. It combines an ethnographic approach including school portraits with a classroom video study. The paper focuses on the video study. It aims at the analysis of successful and innovative language teaching in regular multilingual classrooms. The theoretical framework is provided by concepts about the teaching of academic language as part of minority students’ empowerment (Cummins 2000) and the language of schooling developed from a functional linguistic perspective (Schleppegrell 2004). Academic language (or “Bildungssprache” – a term recently used in the German scientific discourse, Gogolin 2009) is the linguistic register required in schooling. Pupils mastering “Bildungssprache” can respond to both the specific linguistic demands of the tasks in school and of the functional and situational contexts in class and are more likely to succeed in school. The prime concern of the classroom video study is: How do successful teachers support the development of academic language proficiency and use among students from diverse linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds in lessons on different subjects. How do they take into account the different linguistic backgrounds of the pupils and consciously and tactically foster the acquisition and development of “Bildungssprache”? How do they initiate different forms of classroom interaction that open opportunities for the acquisition of different linguistic registers (cf. Mercer 2003, Gibbons 2002)?

Existing indicators and quality criteria for the evaluation of supportive language and content teaching in multilingual contexts serve as a framework for orientation: the ‘Sheltered Instruction Observation Panel - SIOP’ (cf. Echevarria/Short 1999), criteria developed by the German model program “Support for Immigrant Minority Children and Youth –  FörMig” (cf. Gogolin et al 2010) and criteria developed for teaching development in the Swiss project “Quality in Multicultural Schools – QUIMS” (cf. Bildungsdirektion Kanton Zürich 2008).

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