RAISING LANGUAGE AWARENESS THROUGH COMPARISONS
RESEARCH: MULTINGUALISM HAS POSITIVE EFFECTS ON LANGUAGE LEARNING
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Multilingualism in school aims at developing a transcultural communicative competence. It enables students to communicate outside of linguistic and cultural limits.[2] In this way, awareness for a positive attitude towards cultural differences can be raised[3] which is one of the aims within intercultural learning mentioned in school curriculums.
In German-speaking research on multilingualism in schools, the term “Sprachvergleiche” is often mentioned. It translates to “language comparisons” and therefore describes comparisons between languages that enable students to realize particularities of the compared languages, including their mother tongue. This notion of comparisons comes especially into play when fostering intercultural learning because language comparisons can both render the foreign more familiar and render the familiar more foreign at the same time.[4] This is useful because the familiar, i.e. the mother tongue, therefore becomes a matter that can be looked at and studied.[5] It is important to notice that the positive effect of learning more than one language at a time has been approved by the international research community: whereas critics might paint the picture of an overburdened learner, researchers have reached a consensus on language acquisition as a positive instead of negative challenge for learners.[6] When it comes to the psychology of learning, creativity as well as intercultural, metalinguistic, pragmatic and cognitive skills are being trained[7] and expand the learners’ language acquisition techniques. In addition, strategies of learning and decoding languages are cultivated and used in the framework of several languages.[8] Moreover, denunciating multilingualism in schools as ‘too challenging’ does not take into account the fact that the human brain is very much able to learn several languages at a time and that multilingualism is a part of every human’s genetic setting, independent of different levels of intelligence.[9] Thus, research proves that learning several languages at a time is not a disadvantage but advantageous to learners. In practice, this means that already learned languages should be made visible within the context of learning another foreign language. This active incorporation makes way for learners being able to draw upon the already learned languages which concludes in a raised language awareness, higher levels of language competence of all learned languages, triggering of language learning motivation as well as preparation for learning further foreign languages.[10] These findings can also be linked to the Noticing hypothesis of Schmidt (1990) and Robinson (1995) who explained that grammatical features of a foreign language can only be learned if they are consciously detected and processed.[11] This leads to the conclusion that researchers have already made: metalinguistic knowledge that has, for example, been achieved through contrasting and comparing languages to one another, helps learning other languages.[12] |
ABANDONING THE MONOLINGUAL HABITUS
In our more and more globalized world, the number of multilingual people is not likely to shrink but instead to go up. In order to efficiently teach language acquisition techniques that include comparisons and a raised linguistic awareness, the Austrian teacher and researcher Alexandra Wojnesitz states that we need to rethink the way language teaching works. She points out that educational institutions need to adapt to the changing living environment and enable the multilingual paradigmatic change within themselves.[13] In order to achieve this, she explicitly accentuates the teachers’ role in this: “In order to form a multilingual habitus in schools, the teachers’ stance on it is the basic requirement because it is of invaluable significance to the students.”[14] |
First of all, as already pointed out in the interview with JProf. Inger Petersen, finding out about the linguistic potential within a classroom can be the first step to a more multilingual approach in learning. The so-called method of “language autobiographies” enables learners to get in touch with the languages they speak: each learner is asked to draw themselves (on a sheet of paper or with the help of a digital tool) and add the languages they speak to their body.
It might occur that the mother tongue is linked to the heart, as the language of family and love, and other languages might be linked to other body parts like the hands or the brain, depending on each student’s learning and living environment as well as age and biography. This method is both applicable to young and older learners and renders languages more meaningful within the multilingual learning context that is wished for. |
LANGUAGE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
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BASIC COMPARISONS ON THE BLACKBOARD
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Comparisons of languages within the classroom can happen on a very basic, even spontaneous level. For example, during kindergarten or primary school when students learn about salutations in their own or other languages.
Instead of only learning that Bonjour is French for German Guten Tag, students could be asked to derive each word from the phrase, therefore realizing that bon and jour are – like in German – two separate words with meaning on their own. They will also be likely to discover that English native speakers rather use Good morning or Hello instead of Good day. Comparing this, for example, to Polish Dzień dobry the learners will see that they use the same system for Guten Tag, but that when it comes to Good Night they only use one word, Dobranoc, instead of two. We see that even without much preparation for the teacher, learners can be asked which ways of salutations they already know in the languages they speak or have heard of, all of which can be gathered on the blackboard and be compared to one another. It becomes apparent here, that there are many possibilities to conduct both exercises as well as exploratory learning methods from this simple example. If there are already bilingual or multilingual children in the classroom, they can profit from the role as transitional ‘language experts’ and gain self-confidence within their own language speaking abilities[18] – a role that is otherwise often reserved for those who are monolingual. At the same time, monolingual students profit from a more detached perspective on their mother tongue and consciously notice its features and underlying grammar – what they have learnt unconsciously within the grammar of their mother tongue now becomes conscious.[19] |
FURTHER METHODS FOR LANGUAGE COMPARISONS
In her essay on multilingualism in German and foreign language teaching[20], Maren Siems presents several methods and occasions in which multilingual teaching and learning can be made possible. She states that comparisons can be drawn in the lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic fields.[21] Apart from comparing simple sentences and phrases in different languages, she further mentions: |
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