Session Information
19 SES 01, Parallel Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
How are different languages conceptualized in language education interactions in a nursery school in a multilingual inner-city district?
The answers to this question form part of the Ph.D. project “Early language education in a nursery school in a multilingual, poverty-stricken inner-city district in Germany” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Isabell Diehm, University of Bielefeld, Germany). There is hardly any qualitative research yet on how educators in nursery schools conceptualize languages and language education in a multilingual environment. The outlined paper attempts to close this research gap in order to design better training for nursery teachers.
The question of how their first language is valued is crucial to children’s self-esteem and possibly educational success (Brizic 2007). Children whose first languages are denigrated by educators will develop a lower self-esteem and possibly also a lower competence in their second language. If a language is forbidden or regarded as inferior in nursery school, children speaking this language may develop a negative self-concept.
The data was collected by means of ethnographic research during three months of fieldwork in a nursery school in which about two thirds of the children speak other first languages than German. In interviews about the languages used by inhabitants of the district as well as in interactions with children and collected documents, three issues appear (for a more detailed account, cf. outcomes). First, there is a hidden hierarchy of prestigious vs. nonprestigious languages, English being at the top as the “positive exception”, German being the monolingual norm (cf. Gogolin 1994), “migrant” languages being seen as a source of trouble rather than an asset. This becomes visible in different sources of data.
Secondly, ambivalence towards Turkish is pervasive-on one hand it is officially forbidden to speak Turkish in the nursery but on the other hand, Turkish-speaking children are addressed in interactions as experts on their language, such as in bilingual picture-book reading.
Thirdly, language prestige has got spatial connotations; the educators' discourse on spaces of language is highly metaphorical (“other world”) and highlights the perceived differences between the spaces of language. The supposed inferiority of the linguistic features of the district is constructed in combination with the negative image of the place. In a supranational context, the migrants of this district are portrayed by German educators as living in a linguistic “no man’s land” between Turkey and Germany. The theory of intersectionality (Degele/Winker 2009) is helpful to describe the relations between the categories of nationalities, places and languages in the educators’ descriptions and practices.
While the data was collected in Germany, the issue described above is of European dimension- not only because the children in question have many nationalities, but also because comparable issues of migration, language education and language prestige are encountered in many countries (Huf/Panagiotopoulou 2010).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Brizic, Katharina (2007), Das geheime Leben der Sprachen. Gesprochene und verschwiegene Sprachen und ihr Einfluss auf den Spracherwerb in der Migration. Internationale Hochschulschriften 465. Münster Clarke, Adele (2003), Situational Analyses. Grounded Theory Mapping After the Postmodern Turn. Symbolic Interaction 26 (4), p. 553-576 Degele, Nina /Winker, Gabriele (2nd ed. 2010), Intersektionalität. Zur Analyse sozialer Ungleichheiten. Bielefeld Glaser, Barney G. /Strauss, Anselm L. (1967), The Discovery of Grounded Theory - Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York Gogolin, Ingrid (2nd edition 2008), Der monolinguale Habitus der multilingualen Schule. Internationale Hochschulschriften 101. Münster New York Huf, Christina /Panagiotopoulou, Argyro (2010), Ethnographische Forschung im Elementar- und Primarbereich europäischer Bildungssysteme. In: Heinzel, Friederike/ Panagiotopoulou, Argyro (eds)., Qualitative Bildungsforschung im Elementar- und Primarbereich. Entwicklungslinien der Grundschulpädagogik 8. Hohengehren, pp. 60-78. Spradley, James (1984), Participant Observation. New York
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