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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 287

Part of Session 183: Contesting and reconstructing language policies in urban educational settings (Other abstracts in this session)

Multilingual societies and bilingual individuals – can this be the answer towards decreasing educational inequality in Europe?

Authors: Gogolin, Ingrid; Duarte, Joana
Submitted by: Duarte, Joana (University of Hamburg, Germany)

Although Germany has been an immigration country for the past five decades, it was only recently officially acknowledged as such. Furthermore, it is marked by a general monolingual self-understanding very much attached to the idea of a nation-state with one homogenous language (Gogolin 1994). However, in large urban areas in Germany about 35% of the population has a migration background, as well as almost every second child enrolling in primary school (Fürstenau, Gogolin &Yağmur, 2003). Hence, the country is marked by this dichotomy between a monolingual policy discourse and a multilingual societal level, manifested in everyday live and, as a consequence, in educational institutions. The fact is that this political attitude towards Germany’s own migration history and migrants has led to an educational gap between students with a migration background and their monolingual peers. The PISA-study as well as other large monitoring studies have revealed that migrant students in Germany perform significantly lower than their monolingual German counterparts and that this difference is much larger than in other immigration countries (Klieme et al., 2010). The causes of this educational inequality have been found in different selection mechanisms, such as the early tracking in the educational system (grade 4), institutional discrimination on behalf of schools and school staff and lack of proficiency in German, more particularly, in academic language use.

The proposed paper will report on two projects in Germany aiming at the creation of bilingual schools for some of the largest migrant and autochthonous languages. Bilingual classes were set up for the following migrant language combinations: German-Portuguese, German-Italian, German-Spanish and German-Turkish. In addition, in the federal state of Saxony, respective schools were established for the autochthonous minority of speakers of Sorbian. We will present these approaches in light of the question, whether they indicate a move towards a “multilingual” school policy. The paper will problematize the role of such bilingual oriented models in view of growing diversity in Europe where bilingualism has become an almost obsolete concept (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011).