Berge Teaching Young Learners in Bilingual Settings

A teacher cognition study in the context of CLIL at the Dortmund International Primary Schools (DIPS) network
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-381-12803-7
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 247 Seiten

Reihe: Giessener Beiträge zur Fremdsprachendidaktik

Bilingual education, or CLIL, at primary school varies greatly across European educational contexts. Teaching Young Learners in Bilingual Settings reports on a study that explored one such CLIL context in Dortmund, Germany. Through interviews and classroom observations, the researcher and author sought not only to document some of what takes place in CLIL classrooms but to describe and understand teachers' thoughts and beliefs about their CLIL teaching practices. This research contributes to a better understanding of primary school CLIL programs and teachers and is relevant for researchers working in the fields of foreign language education, bilingual education, and language teacher cognition research. Furthermore, the insights into CLIL teachers' thinking can support CLIL teachers, administrators, and policy makers as they seek to further develop CLIL pedagogy and programs.

Paul Berge ist Grundschullehrer in Dortmund. Er promovierte an der Universität Trier.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Berge, Paul

Leseproben

2 CLIL and its Foundations in Theories of Second Language Acquisition

2.1 CLIL and Immersion: Foundations and principles

Bilingual education, broadly understood, has been an established form of foreign language education in Europe since at least the late 1990s and has steadily grown in popularity since then (van Kampen, Meirink, Admiraal, & Berry, 2020; Llinares, 2017; Nikula, Dalton-Puffer, & Llinares, 2013; Bonnet, 2012). This increased popularity of bilingual education (or CLIL) can be linked to geopolitical and economic factors such as globalization and European integration (Wolff, 2016). Specifically, the European Commission’s recommendation that European Union (EU) citizens learn two European Community languages beyond their mother tongue (EC, 1995, p. 47) has motivated the spread and development of CLIL programs throughout Europe. CLIL in Europe, however, as Dalton-Puffer, Nikula, and Smit (2010b) point out, is at risk of becoming CEIL (content and English integrated learning), suggesting that CLIL programs in Europe are doing more to support English, the global lingua franca, than supporting European integration by teaching European languages other than English. If this trend continues, they warn that “[t]rue multilingualism will remain a characteristic of minority and migrant groups as well as socio-economic elites (generally involving economically more advantageous languages)” (Dalton-Puffer et al., 2010b, p. 287). This view of CLIL seems to substantiate Baetens Beardsmore’s (1993, p. 3) earlier assertion that bilingual education programs are “essentially different forms of enrichment programmes.”

In Germany, the modern concept of bilingual education dates back to the mid-1960s with the signing of the Franco-German Treaty of 1963 (Breidbach & Viebrock, 2012) and the subsequent creation of a French-German bilingual program at a in Baden Württemberg in 1969 (Wolff, 2016). As in other European countries, bilingual education did not begin to gain popularity in Germany until the late 1990s and early 2000s (Wolff, 2016).

The early development of bilingual education in Germany took place at secondary schools, primarily at the academically-oriented (Breidbach &Viebrock, 2012). The story of bilingual education at primary school in NRW, however, did not begin until the early 2000s. In the 2003-2004 school year, English as a foreign language (EFL) began to be taught at all primary schools in NRW starting in the third grade (MSW NRW, 2020, October 3). Students would receive two 45-minute EFL lessons per week with the overall goal of developing positive attitudes toward language learning and foreign cultures as well as acquiring initial foreign language competences with a focus on receptive competences (MSW NRW, 2008, p. 71). Shortly after this, the first attempts at implementing various bilingual programs began (Wolff, 2020, September 7). By the 2008-2009 school year, the Ministry of Education in NRW had decided that EFL lessons would begin in the second semester of first grade for all children (MSW NRW, 2020, October 3). The Ministry of Education in NRW has since reverted back to starting EFL lessons in third grade for students starting school in the 2021-22 school year (MSB NRW, 2020).

The number of bilingual programs at primary schools in NRW and in Germany more generally have, of course, increased during the less than 20-year history of German primary school bilingual education. Across Germany, the Association for Early Multilingualism in Preschools and Schools () reports that the number of primary school CLIL programs more than tripled between 2003 and 2014 from 80 to 287 (FMKS, 2016, p. 193). In NRW, they report that there are 34 primary schools with bilingual programs (FMKS, 2016, p. 194) while a review of schools listed on the NRW Ministry of Education website estimates the number to be 33 (MSW NRW, 2015). These numbers suggest that despite an increase in primary school bilingual programs, monolingual education remains the reality for the vast majority of primary school students in NRW. The recent decision in NRW to return to teaching EFL starting in third grade (MSB NRW, 2020) makes the future of bilingual education at primary school in NRW uncertain.

This brief sketch of bilingual education in Germany and NRW highlights two main features of primary school bilingual education: 1) that its history, at least in NRW, is less than 20 years old and, therefore, relatively young and 2) that despite an increase in popularity, primary school bilingual programs are rare.

In Germany, primary school bilingual education is known as (Wolff & Sudhoff, 2015) and is modelled on two main concepts within the field of bilingual education, namely immersion and CLIL. Despite these concepts having unique origins and several differentiating features, they share much in common. Their shared commonalities, though, are likely one contributing factor to the “Babylonian confusion” (Elsner & Keßler, 2013a, p. 2) created when trying to define and label various programs. I will review the historical foundations and key principles of the concepts “immersion” and “CLIL” in the following sections.

2.1.1 Immersion

Immersion education is generally understood as an approach that uses a second, foreign, or indigenous language as a medium of instruction for at least 50 % of the subject curriculum (Lyster, 2018; Elsner & Keßler, 2013a). The modern concept of immersion education has its origins in St. Lambert, Quebec in the 1960s. From its beginning as an approach to language education, the concept of immersion education has evolved in several important ways. Historically, immersion was used as an approach to teach a second language, for example, French to L1 English speakers living in Quebec. In such a context, the target language is accessible to learners outside of the classroom and plays an official role in life outside of school. As the concept and term “immersion” has spread globally, foreign as well as indigenous languages have also been taught via immersion education. For example, the DIPS program, a self-identified immersion program (DIPS, 2020, Sept. 7), uses English, a foreign language for German L1 speakers, as the medium of instruction. Despite its role as a global lingua franca, English does not hold any official role in Germany. In this way, English immersion programs in Germany differ from French immersion programs in Canada. Common, however, to immersion programs is that the target language is a language other than the L1 of most of the students.

The amount of time students spend learning in or through the target language is also important to definitions of immersion. Because immersion requires high amounts of comprehensible input to achieve its goals and generally applies a “natural approach” (Krashen & Terrell, 1983) to language acquisition, it is deemed necessary to teach at least 50 % of the curriculum in the target language (Lyster, 2018, p. 3). Total immersion programs are those in which the entire curriculum is taught in the target language while partial immersion programs are those in which only part of the curriculum is taught in the target language (Elsner & Keßler, 2013b, p. 17). According to Swain and Johnson (1997, p. 9) total immersion programs do not use students’ L1 for a year or more.

Some scholars argue that because immersion programs are content-driven in which the target language is only the medium of instruction, the target language itself is not a curricular concern (Wolff & Sudhof, 2015). This understanding of immersion limits the term’s applicability to programs that do not focus on, for example, language form or language awareness. Immersion is therefore seen as a passive form of language education intended simply to increase the amount of input students are exposed to and through this develop target language competences. Wolff and Sudhof (2015, p. 37), therefore, see immersion as being limited to early childhood and primary school settings, since these contexts tend to be monolingual and focused on natural language acquisition.

Definitions of immersion programs are also based on when a program begins in a child’s development. Early immersion programs typically begin in preschool or in primary school while late immersion programs begin in secondary school (Bechler, 2014, p. 42). Early immersion programs extend the time children spend exposed to and learning a foreign language and thus better prepare them for long term success learning one or more foreign languages (Wode, 2009). Students participating in late immersion programs usually have taken L2 language classes in preparation for the immersion program (Swain & Johnson, 1997).

Immersion programs may also differ in the linguistic profiles of their students. In one-way immersion programs, students who are “linguistically homogenous” and who are “typically dominant in the majority language and have no or minimal immersion language (IL) proficiency on program entry” are enrolled (Tedick, Christian, & Fortune, 2011, p. 2). In two-way immersion programs, L1 speakers of both classroom languages (for example, Spanish and English in the United States) are brought together to develop their L2s, which correspond with some of their classmates’ L1s (Tedick et al., 2011, p. 2). In indigenous language immersion, a one-way or two-way immersion approach is used, depending on the student population....