Forbidding and valuing home languages – divergent practices and policies in a German nursery school

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study analyses practices regarding home languages in a nursery school from a multilingual district in Germany, and the language policies and discourses that become visible in these. First, the context is outlined of Early Childhood Education and Care for multilingual children in Germany; then, the concepts of practices, discourses and language policies are set into relation with each other. After an outline of the ethnographic research design, data are presented from participant observation and analysed with the help of Grounded Theory. Practices and policies of teachers, children and the researcher in a nursery group are explained that either forbid the home language Turkish or value it in accordance with discourses that consider multilingualism a deficit, respectively an asset. The practices of valuing Turkish have the side effect of co-constructing a ‘Turkish speaking’ identity with a child who is not a speaker of Turkish. The researcher unwittingly participated in this construction of a linguistic identity, which exemplifies the entanglements of research in this field. Both practices and policies of forbidding and valuing home languages generate a dichotomy between ‘German’ as the norm and ‘Turkish’ as different. This paper contributes to understanding how nursery teachers and children deal with multilingual contexts.KEYWORDS: German nurserymultilingual city districtmonolingualisationhome languageslinguistic identities AcknowledgementsI thank the journal’s editors and reviewers for their encouraging words and their insightful comments and my proofreader Jackie Pocklington for his thorough work. I am also grateful to the nursery school under research and its staff for their cordial cooperation.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 This widely and often imprecisely employed term (‘Migrationshintergrund’) is set in inverted commas as it can contribute to marking children labelled as migrant children as ‘different’ from the norm.2 A frame curriculum is a curriculum for all federal states of Germany, whereas more detailed curricula are written by the respective federal states.3 The term nursery school is used here as a translation for the so-called ‘Kitas’ or ‘Kindergärten’ in Germany. Nursery schools have curricula and legal regulations determined by the federal states. Although they are not compulsory, almost all children in Germany attend. Some nursery-school educators have diplomas from professional schools, others from colleges of higher education or, more recently, universities. Nursery schools focus on education and care; in the decades following the PISA 2000 study, language education (i.e. learning German) for immigrant children has received special focus.4 Otheguy et al. (Citation2015, p. 281) define translanguaging as ‘the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire’ without distinguishing named languages, such as Turkish and German in this example.5 These issues are not related to the data presented here and are elaborated in more detail in Zettl (Citation2019, pp. 122–130).6 In the following text, three levels of language policy are assumed: micro (field participants, group of children), meso (nursery school and city district), and macro (a federal state or all of Germany). Following Johnson (Citation2016, pp. 13–14) these levels of language policy are not regarded as static or having unidirectional top-down influences. Rather, within each practice, there may be ‘many potential sociolinguistic scales at work’ (Johnson, Citation2016, p. 14).7 The original German text states ‘ein bisschen Deutsch,’ which may mean ‘some German’ in the sense of having some competencies in German, but also ‘a few words in German.’ It could also be interpreted as a politer and indirect way of expressing ‘Deutsch sprechen’ (‘speak German’).8 For reasons of anonymization, these field participants remain unnamed; this was one of the conditions agreed upon with the nursery school for this research.9 For reasons of data protection, the federal state in question is not named. Already at the time of the data collection 2010–2011, the ECEC curriculum of this state regarded multilingualism as a competence and an asset.10 In another sequence, the two nursery-school teachers Laura and Brigitte even interact side by side in accordance with different policies: Brigitte says [I can’t see whom she addresses]: ‘Don’t speak Turkish. Speak German,’ whereas Laura greets persons coming into the nursery school with ‘Hosgeldiniz’ (May 10, 2011).11 Similar questions about children’s home languages are also asked in a standardized language test for nursery-school children, as Diehm et al. (Citation2013a) report; the test was also employed in the nursery school under research in this paper.12 There were also some other artefacts in the nursery school that were bilingual or multilingual or written in home languages: other picture books, game instructions, information leaflets for parents, or words printed on clothing worn by children.13 Cf. also Zettl (Citation2021, p. 146).14 Doing research with children should, as Kelle and Schweda-Möller (Citation2017) point out, neither ignore a potential difference between children and adults nor take this difference for granted. Thus, we should be cautious when ascribing ‘childlike perspectives’ to children’s practices.15 The observation that different teachers employ divergent practices and policies is also made in several studies from a variety of countries: Blaschitz et al. (Citation2021) from Austria, Neumann (Citation2015) from Luxemburg, Isler et al. (Citation2020) from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Thomauske (Citation2017) from Germany and France, and Winter (Citation2022) from Germany. These findings reveal that despite similar curricula on the macro-level of the respective countries, there is ample scope on the micro-level and possibly meso-level for different practices and policies.16 Similarly, Blaschitz et al. (Citation2021) write about a teacher in an Austrian nursery school who tries to speak Turkish but frequently makes basic mistakes.Additional informationFundingThe research project and the publication was generously supported by the University of Education Thurgau, Switzerland, Projektfonds Dozierendenforschung.