Linguistic Diversity Management in a German Urban Area: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Multilingualism

• In Event: Linguistic Diversity: A Global Challenge for Education

Abstract

As a response to the growing diversity in Hamburg, a research center was created to provide a forum for top-level research in multilingualism from an interdisciplinary perspective. The center links perspectives from linguistics, education and urban sociology and focuses on migration-induced multilingualism in urban areas. Within our research agenda, modern urban areas are understood as model cases of ‘super diversity’ – a theoretical framework aiming to capture the level and kind of complexity within societies that is a result of the new features of migration in the 21st century. Linguistic super diversity can be observed at different levels of granularity: on the level of bi- or multilingual individuals and families; on the level of institutions such as schools or municipal establishments, or on the level of cultural or economical participation. In a historical perspective, we argue that the actual diverse reality collides with a ‘monolingual habitus’ that governs (at least) the German public sphere (Gogolin, 1994): a collective disposition that Pierre Bourdieu describes (cf. Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), according to which monolingualism of an individual, a society and the nation state (or defined areas within it) are considered as the ‘normality’, whereas any other linguistic conditions can be treated as exceptions. Our assumption is that this habitual disposition hampers the establishment of supportive provisions for the successful management of linguistic super diversity in education. Based on international research on multilingual schools on one hand (e.g. Cummins 2009), on successful general educational strategies on the other (e.g. Seidel & Shavelson 2007; Einsiedler& Hardy 2010), we assume further that effective teaching in linguistically diverse classrooms requires explicit consideration of the learners’ ‘plurilingual competence’.
In order to test these assumptions we carry out a number of studies, one of which builds the basis for our contribution to the symposium. The exemplar study is a school-based research project, called ‘Linguistic Diversity Video Study LiViS’. The data collection of this project started in October 2011. With this project, we aim to observe the actual language interaction and language education practices in linguistically diverse classrooms of grade 9 or 10, i.e. for students who are 15 years or older. These classrooms do not represent specific educational models but regular mainstream schools. With respect to the composition of their student body, they represent microcosms of the given linguistic diversity in Hamburg. Our data collection and analysis addresses the question: how, if at all, does linguistic diversity play a role in teaching and learning that takes place in a monolingual system, i.e.: in German as the language of schooling. The design of our project allows for detailed observation of language interaction of the students among themselves (each student is voice recorded), as well as of interaction in the classroom that is influenced by the teachers’ interventions. In the contribution, we will present the theoretical framework and design of the project, as well as first results from data collection.

Author

• Ingrid Gogolin, University of Hamburg