Summary
Around the globe – including in Europe and the SMILE project countries Germany, France and Austria – multilingualism is a reality and normality for children and young people growing up. However, linguistic diversity often goes unnoticed and remains an individually, socially and culturally underused resource. Accordingly, there is a great social and economic potential in promoting language skills at school.
While the dominant language of a country commonly is supported, this kind of support often lacks a holistic view of students’ language repertoire. It also misses the importance of recognizing heritage languages for children’s identity development, even though such recognition also can motivate them to learn German as the language of school and their social surroundings (De Houwer, 2013). Furthermore, there are no investments in consistent linguistic support beginning at an early age and lasting until the end of school. The life-long learning potential of multilingualism remains unrecognized.
Recognizing all languages through a broad language portfolio and promoting them as foreign languages or heritage languages not only increases the “probability of employment” on the labour market for future European generations. Language assistance at school also imparts intercultural skills leading, above all, to a change of perspective as well as an increase in accepting diversity and the “other”.
This project result (PR 1) will therefore develop concrete materials and concepts for schools that can be put into practice in every classroom. The materials will enable teachers to incorporate multilingualism into their everyday work. Part of the materials will be tested at locations in Kosovo (in school GFL contexts and in teacher training). A pilot project at mainstream schools in Germany, France and Austria will also be scientifically monitored.
The development of materials and concepts is complemented by a training program for teachers from mainstream schools (i.e. without a bilingual branch/orientation), who have a large multilingual student body at their school, but are inherently stuck in a “monolingual habitus” (Gogolin, 2008). The program will lead to a change of perspective towards more multilingual and intercultural competences, bringing about language self-awareness and an awareness for European multilingualism.
Our concepts will be integrated into teacher training at the universities in Eichstätt, Colmar/Strasbourg and Salzburg. As an additional benefit of this integration and to foster intercultural competence among participants, students from the three training institutions (KU, UNISTRA, PLUS) as well as our external project partner in Kosovo are going to form a network by working with each other in two one-semester courses.
They will work together virtually with the materials and concepts of the multilingual curriculum, while further testing and improving them. They will then be able to implement the curriculum in their teaching activities with their future European students.
As such, the project could act as a reference framework for teacher training and language-sensitive teaching at schools across Europe and it could serve the democratic education of current and future European citizens of multilingual competence.
