Competencies for Translingual Instruction

The comparison between pupils who grow up monolingually with German and those who grow up multilingually shows that the latter are more likely to repeat a grade and drop out of school in Austria. Several factors contribute to this difference, in particular the often poorer socio-economic situation of pupils growing up multilingually. In this book, the lack of adaptation of schools to multilingual pupils is presented as another major factor contributing to this difference. Although multilingual students acquire knowledge multilingually in different languages, schools often only include German in their lessons. As a result, multilingual students cannot use certain parts of their linguistic repertoire for learning and are therefore structurally disadvantaged. To counteract this disadvantage and thus contribute to greater educational equity, a seminar was developed for student teachers of all subjects. The aim of this seminar was to promote students professional competences for translingual instruction. Translingual instruction appropriately incorporates the individual linguistic abilities of all pupils and at the same time promotes their academic language skills in German as the language of schooling. This book provides insights into the development and implementation of this seminar, which was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Excellence in University Teaching in 2021. It also contains detailed information on the scientific evaluation of its influence on the competence development of the participating students. For this evaluation, the students analysed short videos of teaching situations at the beginning and the end of the seminar in which language use played a particular role and was related to certain content of the seminar. Overall, the comparison of the video analyses before and after the seminar shows that the seminar had a significant influence on the development of students` competence development for translingual instruction. Retrospective interviews were also conducted with some students in connection with the video analyses at the end of the seminar. In these interviews, they were asked to report what they thought during the video analyses. The analyses of these interviews show how differently the students processed the content of the seminar and what role the students` individual beliefs played in this. Overall, this book should be seen as a call to recognise the individual linguistic repertoires of all students more strongly as a basic prerequisite for successful learning and to communicate this sustainably in the education of prospective teachers.