MeBis – Multilingualism in Educational Settings: Practices and Attitudes of Teachers, Parents and Children towards Multilingualism

Project Description

While many children grow up with several languages, schooling is usually limited to teaching in the German language. At the same time, the approval of multilingualism in educational processes can have advantages for the learning of all children and can promote the integration of multilingual parents. A positive attitude towards multilingualism is needed as well as effective practices of acting multilingually. At present, however, there is a lack of insights into the attitudes and practices of teachers, parents, and primary students regarding multilingualism - i.e. exactly those groups that are particularly responsible for effective processes.

The MeBis project processed an online survey of querying teachers and parents of primary school students regarding practices and attitudes relating to multilingualism. Primary schoolers were assessed in person in classroom settings. Following this quantitative survey, parents and teachers could volunteer to take part in an in-depth interview. Moreover, multilingual parents could opt to participate in reading out to their child from multilingual books. The interviews and reading observations enabled deeper insights into practices and perspectives of participants - supplementary to the online survey.

Project Objectives

The project had two overarching goals:

• To collect descriptive data on attitudes and practices in dealing with multilingualism among different stakeholders in different educational contexts in order to compare them with each other.
• In addition, to identify and examinde potential factors influencing existing attitudes and practices in dealing with multilingualism.

Funding

Cooperations

Project Management

• Dr. Melanie David-Erb
• Dr. Sabrina Geyer
• Dr. Martin Schastak

Project Details