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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 346

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Linguistic (super-)diversity as an educational challenge in urban schools

Authors: Wiese, Heike (1); Mayr, Katharina (1); Woerfel, Till (1,2); Peter, Jessica (1)
Submitted by: Wiese, Heike (Universität Potsdam, Germany)

Migration has led to urban communities in Europe that are characterised by a new cultural and linguistic diversity. In urban centres, we find multiethnic speech communities that encompass a large number of multilingual speakers who speak a range of different languages in addition to the country’s majority language, as well as monolingual speakers of the majority language. This linguistic wealth provides a fertile ground for linguistic variation and innovation and, as a result, for the development of new ways of speaking, new multiethnic dialects and urban vernaculars.

In popular discourse, this development has triggered the emergence of new language myths based on negative social indexing and stereotyping, and the devaluation of such new linguistic diversity and the speech communities supporting it. We are going to discuss such language myths for the case of Germany, with a focus on the educational sector.

We will analyse the prevalence of negative attitudes towards linguistic variation at schools, and will show how this leads to negative perceptions of pupils speaking nonstandard varieties at general cognitive, behavioural, and affective levels. While this is true for nonstandard varieties in general – including traditional regional and social dialects – it takes on a new dimension in the case of new urban vernaculars from multiethnic speech communities.

We discuss the problems that arise from such teachers’ perceptions and, against this background, put forward a programme for teachers’ education that targets this. The programme is being developed within Special Research Area SFB 632 at Unversity of Potsdam in project T1 on “Modules on Language Variation for Teachers' Education: Dialects, Multlingualism, and the Question of ‘Correct Language’”. It deals with linguistic diversity in general with a focus on new, multiethnic urban vernaculars in particular, working at three levels: (1) It coaches teachers on language variation and language change, and the range of different, systematic variants constituting “a language” such as German; (2) it introduces them to results on language use and linguistic repertoires, and the range of options that speakers habitually choose from; (3) it targets teachers’ linguistic attitudes and stereotypes in a language-directed antibias module that transfers and adjusts methods from antibias approaches to the linguistic reign.