Abstract Summary
Hypothesis of the paper, based on 7th grade Maths classes of bilingual German-Turkish students, is that the employment of home languages in professional instruction enhances the students’ cognitive abilities. The transcripts reflect the verbalization of the ”language of thinking“ in L1 as opposed to L2, related to the diversity of teaching styles.
Abstract :
The hypothesis of the paper is that the employment of home languages (L1) in professional instruction enhances the mental-cognitive abilities of students with migrant history. Reasons for this hypothesis are grounded in discourse analytic action theory (pragmatics of multilingualism), sociolinguistics (constellation of languages of 2nd and 3rd generations of immigrants) and psycholinguistics (language acquisition, neural circuits, receptivity). The concept of ‘language of thinking’ (Denksprache) will be elucidated. The data of the study stems from the interventions of 2 Turkish-German bilingual teachers giving lessons in 7th grade Maths classes of bilingual German-Turkish students, aged 12 to 14, none of whom had received mother-tongue education before in a German school. By means of the fostering multilingual teaching styles, the students’ L1 Turkish is liberated of any service function for a L2 German (monolingually oriented) understanding process; rather, by means of fostering styles a multilingual discursive space of action is opened up in which the students have full access to their multilingual repertoires, enabling them to develop and extend their cognitive creativity in solving the mathematical problems and tasks. The classroom interaction is practised as a ‘multilanguaging’ of German, Turkish, code-switching, Contact Turkish, Turkish German and other varieties. The transcripts reflect the verbalization of this ”language of thinking“ in L1 as opposed to L2. In the classroom discourse, the variable structural relations between L1 and L2 make for the diversity of the styles. Fostering styles as Multilingual Languaging by (reciprocal) nexus show a drift towards multilinguality, whereas non-fostering styles as Multilingual Languaging by replication of L2 into L1 show a drift towards L2 German and yield no additional linguistic and/or cognitive support for mathematical reasoning.
References: Bialystok, Ellen 2009, Li Wei 2017, Rehbein, J. & Çelikkol, M. 2018, Slobin, Dan I. 1996.
