Best success through language loss? (B.E.S.T.)

Which languages are actually transmitted in immigrant families? This is a crucial point in the present fierce European debate on family-language use and immigrant pupils` linguistic/educational success. Quantitative sociology often arrives at the conclusion that maintaining immigrant-family languages is counterproductive to children`s educational success. Qualitative linguistics, in contrast, mainly reveals a positive maintenance effect on children`s school (language) proficiency. The project deals with the question of which of these approaches is justified and how such inconsistencies could emerge. It furthermore investigates why some groups, such as the Turkish immigrants, regularly score so low in regard to educational as well as linguistic success, whether this has anything to do with their language use, as often assumed, and what new answers to these issues would mean for the present fierce educational policy debates in many European immigration societies. From a preceding explorative study and a new explanatory model the following hypotheses have emerged: The interdisciplinary inconsistencies could be caused by the continuing wide gap between qualitative and quantitative data-collection methods, which will thus in the present project be overcome as far as possible by interdisciplinary methods as well as theory. The methods in turn have to be highly sensitive when actual familial language-use patterns (and thus also stigmatised languages, multilingualism or even language loss) are at stake. However, it is precisely linguistic diversity and multilingualism which connect the several groups of origin and therefore cannot be the cause of origin-specific failure, and the same is true for individual, familial and "cultural" factors. In fact, origin-specific failure rather refers to the socio-political macro-level: when language proficiency, use, transmission and loss appear as collective phenomena, they can only result from high societal pressure on a whole group, and thus from social inequality - here: language-political inequality. The sending as well as the receiving societies` education and language policies have paramount influence on how people construct (or deconstruct), show (or hide) and transmit (or give up) their languages and identities. In the case of the Turkish group, language transmission and shift seem to have largely eluded scientific observation so far. However, the project will focus on them, as well as on the investigation of both societies` macro factors and their influence on language use and transmission in this group. If language transmission/ shift can be uncovered in its many facets, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, it should be possible to verify or falsify the overall hypothesis stating: family-language loss does not facilitate school language acquisition, just because language acquisition is a holistic process and highly depends on the quality of parental input. If parents, in contrast, transmit the language(s) they feel "at home" with, children score higher in both family and school languages. It is the incorporation of several disciplines concerned (sociology, socio- /psycholinguistics, research on language shift etc.) which is intended to make the present approach innovative. Thus, for methodology and theory as well as for educational policy practice in sending and receiving societies ample output can be expected.

This project is a linguistic-interdisciplinary inquiry into multilingualism, migration and academic success. Geographically, the study originates from two crossroads of multilingualism and migration: Vienna and Istanbul, both cities representing starting points as well as destinations of past and contemporary migration flows, particularly from the Balkans and central and eastern Turkey. The research focuses on educational inequality (ethnic segmentation), one of the most significant manifestations of social inequality in modern societies. The aim is a deeper understanding of the reproduction and above all the overcoming of inequality. By applying methodological approaches from a range of different disciplinary areas, the school careers of roughly 180 children have been reconstructed. Much space was allowed for the communication with the children, teachers and schools as well as families (as parts of multilingual communities). The children were at the time of data collection aged 10. The sample was designed to address a wide range of translocal movements (internal and international migration and flight), three different and interwoven immigration or sending societies (Turkey, the Balkans, Austria), and a multitude of languages (German, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Aramaic, Arabic, Bosnian/ Croatian/ Serbian, Romani, Albanian, Romanian, Macedonian, among others) with manifold language-use patterns (mono-, bi- and multilingualism, language maintenance and shift). Moreover, the project comprises a home- language survey (Multilingual Cities), with 90% of the Viennese primary schools participating (i.e. roughly 20.000 children throughout the municipal area), thus adding a broad context to the core sample. The projects key concern is to challenge the concepts of origin and group affiliation against the background of school success. The aim is to have a close look at the mechanisms that define and construct a group and consequently assign failure or success to whole population strata, regions and schools, largely irrespective of individual performance. The projects results comprise new approaches for didactics and multilingualism research concerning the achievement of academic and linguistic success. Among numerous other findings, an instrument for the assessment of childrens language proficiency has been developed regarding an aspect highly relevant to school success. The findings are intended to contribute not only to linguistic and sociological approaches to inequality, but also to the large area of biography research, the construction of groups from inside and outside, and the many ways of narrating, remembering and reconstructing individual and collective experience. Tying in with these findings, the projects publication will also aim at providing new perspectives on some demanding questions in international conflict and peace studies.