Project summary: Acknowledging, Building on and Leveraging Multilingualism in German as a Foreign Language (DaF) and German as a Second Language (DaZ) Teaching and Learning Contexts (MALWE) The MALWE innovation project aims to develop a plan of action that guides teachers and prospective teachers in promoting young people’s language skills (especially in German) appropriately and in a resource-oriented manner that takes into account the heterogeneous situation in terms of their existing language skills. The project thus intends to contribute to promoting multilingualism in Europe and starts with a comprehensive understanding of multilingualism (school-based, life-world, migration-induced multilingualism) and the promotion of language skills, in German as a Foreign Language (DaF) and German as a Second Language (DaZ) teaching, as well as in language-sensitive teaching. To achieve this goal, a consortium of four project teams from four partner countries (Austria, Czechia, Germany, Poland) was set up. Each team comprises two to four teachers (DaF, DaZ or language-sensitive teaching) who are currently actively teaching as well as two or three university-based researchers from the respective disciplines who are actively delivering teacher training and in-service education. The collaborative efforts of the teams and of the partner countries lead to a plan of action featuring various products that are first developed and then piloted in the classroom in each of the partner countries. During the project work, teachers from all of the countries visit their counterparts’ classrooms, use criteria they have developed to evaluate their observations and adapt them to optimize the products. The products include the following: 1) a theoretical, interdisciplinary model for promoting language skills in the context of multilingualism, 2) a reflection format for classroom observation of resource-oriented multilingual teaching and learning situations, 3) classroom scenarios that serve as models for teaching and learning opportunities that are conducive to language learning, 4) teaching vignettes that provide model situations for analyzing teaching involving multilingual students and can be used in teacher training and in-service education, and 5) a teaching and learning platform that develops in the course of the project from a conventional web page for presenting the project to an interactive teaching and learning platform that offers in-service education for teachers for catering for multilingualism in heterogeneous language learner groups. Finally, all products are combined to form a comprehensive plan of action presented as a set of guidelines. The research accompanying the project is expected to provide solid findings about the added value of teacher training that takes multilingualism in the classroom into account. MALWE is therefore a viable concept for acknowledging and valuing multilingualism in the classroom and at the same time symbolizes the added value of transnational collaboration.
A common understanding of the added value of multilingualism in Europe should emerge and guidance for people in teacher professionalisation should be developed, which are or can be helpful and supportive for the appreciation and integration of multilingualism in language teaching.
From the perspective of language teaching, in this case German, the greatest interest is to bring together the different disciplines on the topic of multilingualism in Europe and to bring them into dialogue about their respective language teaching. In doing so, it is crucial, and therefore precisely these aspects were repeatedly the focus of our exchange, to get to know and experience the perspectives of the institutions of the partner countries, to perceive them in their country-specific embeddedness (university and school) and, on this basis, to discuss the different ideas of multilingualism and the added value of multilingualism with each other.