Imki

Preschools today are host to children with different language backgrounds. Teachers therefore have to deal with the question of how to handle increasing linguistic diversity. The advice is to actively integrate the children’s heritage languages into the daily life of the preschool, with the intention of supporting their bilingual and social-emotional development. Yet, to date, there has been little to no research concerning the effects of this kind of integration of linguistic diversity in preschools. The objective of this study was to identify the conditions for successful multilingual development in preschool contexts, with focus on children aged 3-6 who have a migration background and therefore grow up multilingually in Germany. Special attention was paid to the heritage language development of Turkish-German and Russian-German children.

An intervention study in 19 daycare centres was planned with six measurement points at annual intervals. The participating preschools were randomly divided into two groups to receive special training on linguistic diversity over a period of four years. The two groups differed with respect to the type of training received. Changes resulting from the training were recorded and assessed at the child, institutional and parent level.

At the child level, competences in German and the relevant heritage language (Turkish or Russian) were examined at each measurement point. Social-emotional factors (such as pro-social behaviour, problematic behaviour, self-regulation, social skills) and the children’s self-concept were also captured.

At the institutional level, structural conditions (e.g. the number of multilingual children in the group), institutional processes (e.g. interactions to foster language use) and levels of professionalism with regard to language and multilingualism (e.g. the availability of bi- and multilingual learning materials) were assessed. Data on teachers’ educational backgrounds and personality characteristics, their attitudes towards and knowledge of multilingualism were collected.

At the parent level, information regarding socioeconomic background, migration history, language use (including daily multilingual practices) and acculturation was recorded. Participating parents were also asked about their satisfaction with the preschool in general and language support in particular, as well as whether they participate in the life of the preschool.

At the child level, it could be established that children who grow up with Turkish and German arrive at pre- school with age-appropriate knowledge of their family language (Turkish), especially regarding active and passive vocabulary and, as would be expected, they increase their knowledge of German at pre- school. As the children grow older, however, a relative decrease in active Turkish vocabulary can be seen when compared with slowly increasing German proficiency. Across the board, a clear influence of one language processing measure — phonological memory — can be seen; there are significant correlations between this and performance in the other language. When attempting to predict competences in both languages as well as an overall measurement of linguistic competence, phonological memory also plays a decisive role, appearing to be just as important to successful multilingualism as environmental factors in the family (e.g. linguistic stimulus content or an equal use of both languages by mothers and siblings) and early education (such as early entry into a childcare setting).

In relation to social-emotional competences, the multilingual children as a whole were not perceived to be problematic or to display conspicuous behaviour. However, there is a clear link between proficiency in the L2 (German) and in part also in the heritage language (Turkish) and children’s social-emotional competences. Higher linguistic competences appear to accompany higher competences in social and emotional areas. This correlation can also be seen over the course of the children’s development. To what extent social-emotional competences can predict linguistic performance (or vice versa) is to be clarified as a result.

Within the participating institutions, a great diversity of heritage languages was observed. Besides German, there were at least nine other languages. The teachers tended to display open attitudes to multilingualism. However, multilingualism was only rarely included in the daily life of the preschools. Analyses show that the teachers’ attitudes toward and knowledge of multilingualism were linked to this. Teachers who know a lot about multilingualism, and view it as enrichment, do more to integrate multilingualism into the preschool. Whether teachers are themselves multilingual does not appear to be relevant here. On the contrary, multilingual teachers tended to be in favour of the multilingual children adapting linguistically to German. Changes were achieved in the teachers’ knowledge of multilingualism, but the attitudes proved to be stable. In daily preschool life, following one year of intervention, the first signs of change could be seen in regard to valuing the children’s languages. Peer interactions in heritage languages were increasingly permitted, and in the intervention group there was an increasing amount of multilingual material for parents.

Children’s linguistic starting points should be used to support them in all their languages at preschool. So that this can successfully occur, teachers must reflect on their own attitudes toward multilingualism. However, just reflecting on these attitudes is not sufficient. They also need to expand their knowledge of the linguistic development of multilingual children as well as their professional knowledge relating to multilingual learning. In order to transfer this knowledge to practice, clear opportunities for the inclusion of multilingualism need to be made more explicit. Simply employing multilingual teachers alone will not lead to improvements in this area on account of the degree of linguistic diversity in today’s preschools. Teachers must also go through a reflection process and expand their knowledge so that they can use their own multilingualism in positive ways in practice.

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