According to current educational policy guidelines, students' multilingualism has to be recognized and promoted by teachers when instructing a foreign language (e.g. Council of Europe 2001: 14, 16; ibid. 2018: 159-164). Despite the positive effects of cross-linguistic approaches that have led to a paradigm shift within foreign language didactics in Germany, empirical studies repeatedly point to a dichotomy between positive teacher attitudes concerning multilingualism and a lack of implementation of multilingual didactics in real teaching practice (e.g. Bredthauer & Engfer 2018: 9-10; Heyder & Schädlich 2014: 193-196). In fact, it can be observed that teachers who are willing to integrate students' linguistic resources into foreign language instruction usually fail to achieve positive effects because they conduct unsystematic language comparisons at the lexical or grammatical level, which, in addition, do not include any family languages at all (e.g. Bermejo Muñoz 2019: 110-111; Bredthauer & Engfer 2018: 10-12; Heyder & Schädlich 2014: 193-196). This situation indicates the need for a more grounded, systematic and reflective teacher education that focuses on the didactics of multilingualism (e.g. Königs 2006: 216-219; Meißner 2001: 114). The outlined desideratum forms the groundwork for an ongoing PhD project that aims to integrate multilingual didactics into existing academic curricula of prospective teachers of Romance languages. In detail, the project intends to improve university students' knowledge, skills as well as their individual perceptions of their own competences when it comes to the implementation of a multilingual didactic approaches in future teaching scenarios. For that purpose, an intervention consisting of multilingual modules has been developed, tested and re-designed several times, taking into account the principles of design-based research. Accordingly, the presentation will provide concrete insights into the teaching modules, the methodological procedure and the first meaningful results of the empirical test cycles which have been conducted at the University of Münster.
References:
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Bredthauer, S. & Engfer, H. (2018). Natürlich ist Mehrsprachigkeit toll! Aber was hat das mit meinem Unterricht zu tun? In: Kölner Universitäts Publikations Server ‹https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/8092› (17.05.2022).
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Heyder, K. & Schädlich, B. (2014). Mehrsprachigkeit und Mehrkulturalität – eine Umfrage unter Fremdsprachenlehrkräften in Niedersachsen. In: Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht – Didaktik und Methodik im Bereich Deutsch als Fremdsprache 19 (1), 183-201.
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Meißner, F.-J. (2001). Mehrsprachigkeitsdidaktik im Studium von Lehrenden fremder Sprachen. In: Königs, F. G. (ed.), Impulse aus der Sprachlehrforschung. Marburger Vorträge zur Ausbildung von Fremdsprachenlehrerinnen und -lehrern, Tübingen: Narr, 111-130.
