Year: 2024
Author: Hanne Brandt, Jule Böhmer, Regina Schauer, Rebecca Möller, Dietmar Höttecke, Ingrid Gogolin
Type of paper: Poster
Abstract:
Growing up with more than one language is a reality for an increasing number of children and young people worldwide, especially in urban areas. In Hamburg (Germany), over half of all children are multilingual, making linguistic diversity a key consideration in education. Simultaneously, large-scale assessments reveal that (multilingual) migrant pupils in Germany have significantly lower attainment levels than their non-migrant peers. As strong language skills are vital for academic achievement, students who are not prepared for the language of schooling through family literacy practices need continuous and systematic language support to keep up with their peers. This includes integrated language and content learning across the curriculum, as well as the inclusion of students’ heritage languages into the learning process. Although linguistically responsive teaching approaches are widely recommended and have shown promising results in practice, their actual effectiveness has hardly been investigated.
In our intervention study, we aimed to address this research gap by investigating two main questions: 1) What effects do an explicit focus on academic language and the additional use of students’ multilingual skills in content teaching have on students’ content knowledge in linguistically diverse settings? 2) How do these effects vary according to students’ language proficiency in German (and their heritage languages)?
To address the research questions empirically, six 90-minute physics lessons on “energy” were developed and taught in three variants: (1) Content and Language Learning focusing on academic German skills (CLIL). (2) CLIL with an added multilingual component encouraging multilingual students’ use of home languages in certain phases (CLIL-M), and (3) a control group (C). All lessons were parallel in subject content and designed to meet basic dimensions of teaching quality.
The effect of the teaching variants on the students' knowledge about energy was tested longitudinally (pre-, post-, follow-up). Background information on cognitive and global language skills in German and selected heritage languages, attitudes towards physics, and socio-economic and language biographical aspects were collected as independent variables.
The study targets students at district schools in rather disadvantaged areas of Hamburg, where a large proportion of the student body speaks a heritage language other than (or in addition) to German. We recruited seven schools for the study; the sample includes approximately 550 ninth-grade students from 31 classes. Data collection was finished in early 2024. Currently, we are engaged in data cleaning and preprocessing, and have commenced our analyses. At the conference, we will present preliminary findings.
In our intervention study, we aimed to address this research gap by investigating two main questions: 1) What effects do an explicit focus on academic language and the additional use of students’ multilingual skills in content teaching have on students’ content knowledge in linguistically diverse settings? 2) How do these effects vary according to students’ language proficiency in German (and their heritage languages)?
To address the research questions empirically, six 90-minute physics lessons on “energy” were developed and taught in three variants: (1) Content and Language Learning focusing on academic German skills (CLIL). (2) CLIL with an added multilingual component encouraging multilingual students’ use of home languages in certain phases (CLIL-M), and (3) a control group (C). All lessons were parallel in subject content and designed to meet basic dimensions of teaching quality.
The effect of the teaching variants on the students' knowledge about energy was tested longitudinally (pre-, post-, follow-up). Background information on cognitive and global language skills in German and selected heritage languages, attitudes towards physics, and socio-economic and language biographical aspects were collected as independent variables.
The study targets students at district schools in rather disadvantaged areas of Hamburg, where a large proportion of the student body speaks a heritage language other than (or in addition) to German. We recruited seven schools for the study; the sample includes approximately 550 ninth-grade students from 31 classes. Data collection was finished in early 2024. Currently, we are engaged in data cleaning and preprocessing, and have commenced our analyses. At the conference, we will present preliminary findings.