What happens when the languages children already speak are left out of school? And what opportunities are we missing as a result? The Erasmus+ project Your Language Counts! brought together partners from five countries to develop new approaches to Heritage Language Education (HLE).
The Kompendium DaF/DaZ series has come out with a guide to “Multilingual Learning in Social and Institutional Contexts”. This new publication delves into various aspects of the debate over multilingual education – and recapitulates them clearly for both prospective and experienced GFL and GSL teachers.
How does discrimination against languages and their speakers manifest itself? And how can teachers combat various forms of “linguicism” in the classroom? This is the focus of a Vienna-based association called Migrationspädagogische Zweitsprachdidaktik.
Learners of German as a foreign language often have a wide range of prior language skills: their native language, English or other foreign languages they’ve learnt at school, or expressions they’ve picked up whilst travelling or at work. A multilingual approach can take advantage of these various language skills to help German learners.
Multilingual learners consolidate reading strategies more effectively if they can draw on all their language skills – an approach that valorizes and makes the most of their previous knowledge.
Teachers can take steps to make sure that tests only measure students’ content knowledge rather than their reading comprehension.
Language learning trains the brain. Learning two languages at an early age develops language skills in general. But bilingual kids also do better in other cognitive subjects – like mathematics. Professors Michaela Sambanis and Heiner Böttger explain why a paradigm shift is needed and how to make it work.
Innovative technology helps us communicate in different languages. Will translation apps make learning a foreign language superfluous? How can we rekindle the desire to learn languages? Professors M. Sambanis and H. Böttger share some fascinating findings from neuroscience research on language learning.
Language mediation is the sixth competence defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Why has it become more important and how can it be incorporated into lessons?
Physics lessons presuppose a knowledge of mathematics; to learn basketball, one must already have learned to throw a ball; politics classes often draw on the pupils’ knowledge of history. It is surprising, then, that foreign language classes appear to stand on their own. This tendency results in the loss of important potential when teaching GFL.
How can teachers take advantage of multilingual potential in their classes? And how can trainee teachers best be prepared for linguistic diversity in the classroom? Theorists and practitioners in Germany and Europe are looking into these questions.
One in three children in Germany is born into a family of migrant origin. Anja Wildemann from the University of Koblenz-Landau, studies how the multilingual abilities of such children can be utilized in primary schools.
