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

Abstract

This 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.

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