Our poster presents findings of focus groups with primary school teachers and teacher trainers on the implementation of multilingual approaches in Swiss primary schools. Participants appraised multilingual activities regarding their curricular relevance and their potential to develop language competence on the basis of filmed sequences of pupils dealing with these activities.
This poster presents findings of a research project, which explores the possibilities and limits of implementing multilingual approaches in the foreign language (FL) classroom in Swiss primary education. In Switzerland, multilingual approaches have recently been integrated into curricula and most FL course books of primary schools. The expectations of multilingual approaches are manifold: language awareness activities are seen as a means to foster a deeper understanding of how languages function, while language transfer activities are considered as a means of accelerating (third) language learning. Furthermore, multilingual approaches are regarded as a possibility to valorise the various heritage languages spoken in class (e.g. Krumm 2016). Despite these high expectations, empirical studies on multilingual approaches and their implementation in primary school are still rare. The first objective of our study was therefore to ascertain how young learners deal with multilingual activities. To this end, we filmed how primary school pupils in 10 foreign language classes dealt with prototypical multilingual activities constructed on the basis of an analysis of FL course books currently used in Switzerland. In our poster, we will focus on the results of the last project phase, in which we organized focus groups with teachers and teacher trainers. The participants were shown several sequences filmed during the observational study and were asked to appraise the activities in terms of their curricular relevance and their potential to develop language (learning) competence. As a content analysis of the four focus groups shows, participants are rather critical about the curricular relevance of these activities, as they often could not ascertain their objectives among other things. Krumm, H.-J. (2016). Mehrsprachigkeit als Kapital - eine Einsicht und ihre Konsequenzen für ein bildungsgerechtes Schulwesen. In: Mehrsprachigkeit und Bildungsgerechtigkeit: Erkundungen einer didaktischen Perspektive (S. 59–68). Opladen etc.: Barbara Budrich.
