Preparing Pre-service Teachers for Multilingual Learning—Findings from a Study on Competence Development for Multilingual Education

Abstract Summary

Abstract :

Over the past two decades, an intensive discussion has revolved around obstacles for the academic success of pupils whose language use does not comply with the language use at school, focusing particularly on immigrant pupils and pupils from families with low socio economic status (Cummins, 2013). In this context, learning environments that support the acquisition of the language/s of schooling as well as the development of pupils’ full linguistic repertoire are seen as a key factor to promote educational success (Vetter & Durmus, 2017). However, research on how pre-service teachers acquire the competencies necessary to create such learning environments is scarce. This contribution draws on results of a study on this underexplored issue that investigated to what extend a specially designed video-based teacher education course about language/s in education influenced the competence development of three cohorts of pre-service teachers (n = 52). As indicator for competence development, the concept of professional vision is used, which is the ability to notice and reason about relevant classroom events (van Es, Cashen, Barnhart, & Auger, 2017). The data was collected using a pre- and post-video analysis task, in which pre-service teachers were asked to describe, explain and interpret the language use in four short videotaped classroom situations in written form. In addition to this analysis task, stimulated recall interviews were conducted in order to gain deeper insights into the nature of the participants’ professional vision and its development. Different methods were used for data analysis: qualitative content analysis for the data from the video analysis task and linguistic textual analysis for the stimulated recall interviews. Results indicate a quantitative and qualitative increase in noticing and reasoning about relevant classroom events as well as a higher acceptance for multilingual learning. In this presentation, important practical and theoretical implications of the findings will be discussed.

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