Poster #218 - Fostering Language Acquisition in German ECEC Settings: Structural Characteristics and ECEC Teachers’ Attitudes

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Social Policy

Integrative Statement

Early language acquisition and its targeted fostering in ECEC settings has become increasingly important in Germany, since a substantial amount of children entering school lag behind in their language abilities and thus face lasting educational disadvantages. Since 2014, state regulations in North Rhine-Westphalia require language education to be implemented as part of the daily routine in each of the nearly 10.000 state regulated ECEC centers located in this part of Germany. To endorse this, North Rhine-Westphalia’s state government has allocated additional funds for ECEC teachers to childcare centers with high quotas of children in need of additional support in their development and early language acquisition. This paper presents selected results of a comprehensive survey (N = 1679) and also includes results of 27 in-depth interviews conducted with the heads of childcare centers in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Data acquisition is completed and data analysis is ongoing. We focus here on potential relations between structural characteristics of the childcare centers (e.g. proportion auf multilingual children and children from impoverished families, ratio of multilingual to monolingual ECEC teachers, etc.), qualifications and personal characteristics of the responding head of the childcare center and her professional attitudes. Preliminary results show that additional funding provided by the state government is associated with both: allocation to daycare centers with relatively higher amount of children at risk, as well as more elaborated language acquisition programs, more often combining integrated approaches with add-on programs (see Figure 1). Furthermore, ECEC centers receiving additional state funding, report to employ more specifically qualified ECEC teachers (see Figure 2), they also emphasize the importance of knowledge transfer from explicitly trained individuals to all staff members, in order to implement integrated language fostering. These results as well as further analyses will be discussed with regard to implications for research and practice in ECEC. Implications drawn from these results include evidence for further professional training enabling ECEC teachers to better support children’s early language acquisition as well as broadening their understanding of integrated language fostering educational approaches as opposed to exclusive add-on language training units.

Authors

• Kristine Blatter, German Youth Institute
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katarina Groth, German Youth Institute
  Non-Presenting Author

• Veronika Eichmann, German Youth Institute
  Non-Presenting Author

• Margarita Stolarova, German Youth Institute
  Presenting Author