Perspectives on Bilingual Education of Turkish Migrant Parents in France and Germany

• In Event: 56.052 - International Perspectives on Bilingualism in Early Childhood Education and Care Programs

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a study of views of Turkish immigrant parents living in Germany and France on bilingualism in ECEC settings. The method of the larger study from which the data for this paper is drawn was to film typical days in preschools in France, Germany, England, Italy, and the US and then to use these videos as a cue for focus-group interviews with teachers and parents. The focus of this paper is on a subset of the larger study. My findings are based on a comparison of the language practices shown in the French and Germany videos and on analysis of the focus groups I conducted with Turkish parents in Germany and France as they reacted to a video we made of a day at a kindergarten in Berlin. This video includes several provocative scenes of Turkish children code-switching between Turkish and German as they engage with each other as well as interacting with non-Turkish classmates and with their teachers.

France and Germany are different kinds of receiving communities for Turkish immigrants. France’s official approach to immigration is Republican and assimilationist, Germany’s multicultural and communitarian. The French école maternelle approach to language is French only, with no support for the use of home languages at school. In the video we see French teachers interacting with migrant children and parents from several countries. The teachers speak only French to the parents and children and discourage the use of languages other than French. In contrast, in the German kindergarten video we see teachers encouraging children of migrant families to use their home languages and parents encouraged to enter the classroom.

A key finding of this study is that the Turkish parents in France were, compared to their counterparts in Germany, more satisfied with their child’s preschool’s approach to language and culture. This is surprising and challenges the prevalent view in Anglophone scholarship that suggests that immigrant parents desire bilingual, multicultural approaches. One explanation for this finding is that the Turkish parents in France find the French Republican, secular approach more familiar than the German multicultural approach. Turkey has a political system like France that is based on secularism and Turkish schools also discourage the use of home languages in schools and other public settings.

Another key factor is that the openness of the German kindergarten to the use of the home language turns out to be less than it appears. For example, in one scene in the video the teacher tells a group of four Turkish girls and one German boy sitting around the lunch table that because not everyone speaks Turkish they must speak German. The German kindergarten’s openness to Turkish language and culture and to parent perspectives often ends up feeling to Turkish parents like a deception and a trap. In contrast, the école maternelle’s policy of the school taking sole responsibility for socializing children into citizens of the republic has the virtue of being familiar and clear.

Author

• Fikriye Kurban, Arizona State University