Teaching multilingual learning groups is an important part of the professional activity of primary teachers in Germany, placing high demands on their occupational professionalism. The aim of this article is to analyse the effects of educational and occupational influencing factors on the beliefs of teachers regarding multilingualism as a facet of…

In 2009, the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany enacted a law that prescribed a binding module on dealing with linguistic diversity for all future teachers in every university offering teacher training in the state. In this paper, we present an interview study with teacher educators in this so-called DaZ module and their views on…

Learning a new language after forced migration has hardly ever been studied from the perspective of children. Their viewpoint, however, gets even more important, if we want to understand the lifelong consequences of their early experiences. With this aim, we use autobiographical accounts of persons who were rescued from Nazi Germany and brought to…

In this article, we present a qualitative investigation which was conducted as part of a project on school development in the field of multilingualism in Germany. In order to gain insight into the relationship between primary school teachers' language experience and their practice regarding the inclusion of pupils' home languages at school,…

This article reports on the initial findings from an ethnographic study conducted in a preparatory class for young refugees in Cologne, Germany. Focusing on the current language policy which aims to integrate newly arrived children into the German society through language assimilation in schools, this study examines how such policies (re)produce…