Scoping review on heritage language teaching
From the perspective of a post-migrant society, the promotion of allochthonous minority languages (so-called "heritage languages") is one of the tasks of language education. Heritage language teaching (HLT) serves as an important formal and informal instructional resource for maintaining and developing the first language skills of multilingual learners in an immigrant society.
Despite the importance of HLT in post-migrant societies, it faces a significant challenge in German education policy. This challenge is posed e.g. by the poor performance of German students in large-scale assessments, reopening discussions about reintegration and the effective allocation of multilingual resources (cf. Küppers, Şimşek & Schroeder, 2015, pp. 43). However, these discussions are based on little or no empirical research on HLT, which is partly due to the limited empirical basis for HLT in German-speaking countries (cf. Gogolin & Woerfel, 2021), particularly in terms of understanding the effects of language learning and the conditions under which HLT is implemented. Only recently an increasing number of empirical studies have emerged in Germany, although they are often still unconnected because they are carried out in different disciplines with different theoretical and methodological perspectives.
One of the primary goals of the meta-project is to conduct a scoping review in order to
- provide a reproducible overview of empirical research from various disciplines in German-speaking countries and supplement it with
- empirically proven conditions of HLT from classic immigration societies.
This will serve as a solid basis for evidence-based decisions in educational policy, practice, and research for further development of HLT in Germany.
Members of the project team in Cologne will conduct the scoping review.
Duration:
since 2023
References:
Gogolin, Ingrid & Woerfel, Till (2021). Grundwissen Sprachbildung: Herkunftssprachlicher Unterricht Verfügbar unter: https://www.mehrsprachigkeit.uni-hamburg.de/oeffentlichkeit/grundwissen/hsu.html
Küppers, Almut; Şimşek, Yazgül & Schroeder, Christoph (2015). Turkish as a minority language in Germany: aspects of language development and language instruction. Zeitschrift für Fremdsprachenforschung, 26 (1), 29–51.