05/06/2025, 14:30 - 06/06/2025, 13:30, Essen
This workshop aims to compare US and German approaches to bilingual education and heritage language teaching. It explores similarities and differences in order to identify common research areas and potential solutions for future generations’ language maintenance within the context of schooling and policies.
Although both the USA and Germany exhibit wide-ranging plurilingual realities, the implementation of bilingual education – particularly in Germany – remains in need of improvement. Moreover, there is a lack of fundamental research addressing linguistic and educational concerns related to bilingual schooling.
This workshop aims to compare US and German approaches (particularly in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia) regarding bilingual education and heritage language teaching (HLT). While the benefits of bilingual education are well-documented in the USA, the primary focus in Germany remains on the acquisition of German as a second language. Scholarly discussions on HLT in Germany have emerged relatively recently, despite the involvement of many heritage languages and different generations of speakers. Key issues include the acceptance and the future role of HLT in general as well as expectations regarding linguistic outcomes. In North America, bilingual education programmes are well established as a means of fostering language diversity, and pedagogical concepts for multilingualism are broadly discussed.
The primary focus of the workshop is to explore similarities and differences in order to identify common research areas and potential solutions for future generations’ language maintenance within the context of schooling and policies.
The workshop is open to members of the University Alliance Ruhr. It is co-organised by Jeff MacSwan from the University of Maryland (USA), who is currently a Senior Fellow at the College, and Katja Cantone-Altıntaș and Tobias Schroedler from the Institute for German as a Second and Foreign Language at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Please register by 2 June 2025:
College for Social Sciences and Humanities, Essen
Kara Mitchell Viesca, PhD, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA) whose scholarship focuses on advancing equity in the policy and practice of educator development, especially for teachers of multilingual students, will discuss issues and possibilities related to the framing of equity and pedagogy in multilingual education and teacher education. Specifically, through an examination of past research, practice, and policy framings from the US and Northern European contexts and the discussion of potential re-framings, Dr Viesca will highlight the possibilities of our work today that can lead to more promising tomorrows, especially organised around multilingual community thriving.
