Refine
Year of publication
- 2019 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Keywords
Institute
Globalization has not only changed our society, it has also had a profound effect on education. Many schools deal with student populations which, due to migration, are increasingly multilingual. Politically, few argue against the importance of multilingualism; rather, it is promoted. However, in practical terms the challenges associated with teaching and educational policies have increased as a result of linguistic diversity among student bodies. Moreover, reading is certainly regarded as a key learning skill, but how is the students’ life-world multilingualism (LWMUL) taken into consideration? Previous research suggests that there are significant links between teachers’ beliefs and practices, making this a compelling issue. The overall aim of this study was thus to gain a deeper understanding on teachers’ beliefs and strategies when teaching reading in multilingual settings. Using a cross-disciplinary, qualitative research methodology approach, the empirical inquiry consists of case studies with different, linguistically diverse settings. The case studies include classroom observations as well as teacher interviews in German, Swedish and Chilean grade 4 classrooms. After a qualitative content analysis in three analysis procedures, the results suggest dualistic beliefs being exhibited by the teachers. The separation of languages is believed to be of major importance, thus providing space almost exclusively for the academic language of instruction. This is reflected in the teachers’ strategies, leading to a static implementation, in which the students’ life-world multilingual resources (MULR) are generally not included. A lack of professional competence could be observed in issues regarding multilingualism, allowing beliefs rather than evidence-based knowledge to be the deciding factor in the practice. Four types of strategies for teaching reading in multilingual settings were identified, and an inattentive type of strategy, including a blindness to difference, seems to dominate.
One of the great challenges facing Europe today is the fast integration of migrants into society and the labour
market. This is made even more challenging by the fact that a great number of migrants only have a low level of education. The EU-funded project Fast Track Integration in European Regions (FIER) allows European
project-partners from regions with a high influx of refugees to interconnect in order to develop, test and evaluate joint innovative measures and strategies for a sustainable and fast labour-market-integration.
Based on this background and as part of the FIER-project “Language training on the job (LaTJo)”, the Akademie
für wissenschaftliche Weiterbildung der Pädagogischen Hochschule Weingarten (AWW) has developed a training program for the position of “Mentor for Language Learning at the Workplace”. The training enables Germanspeaking
employees of the participating companies to assist
their new colleagues with their integration at the workplace, especially by mentoring them in the field of work-related language acquisition. Here the workplace serves as a valuable language-learning-space, and the job-related actions and activities as natural prompters for language mentoring. The training is presented in detail in this manual.