Students’ reasons for (not) using their home languages during linguistically responsive reciprocal teaching.

Abstract

The inclusion of students’ home languages in the classroom can be substantiated from a cognitive and from a recognition theory perspective. Nevertheless, initial studies show that multilingual students rarely use their home languages even when encouraged to do so. The paper presents reasons from students’ perspectives for (not) using their home languages during the cooperative method of Reciprocal Teaching in elementary school. For data analyses, we used data from a reading intervention study with 667 fourth graders. Teachers participated in a professional development workshop in which awareness of multilingualism and Reciprocal Teaching were embedded in an instructional unit. They then implemented the instructional unit in their German classes. In addition to assigning language partners within small groups, language portraits, bilingual material, and multilingual audio-pens were used to stimulate multilingual interaction. After the instructional unit, students answered the question whether they spoke in a language other than German during the intervention and were asked to justify their answer. In total, 63% of the multilingual students indicated that they did speak a language other than German. Using qualitative content analysis, we identified five main categories of reasons for multilingual interaction: individual, group, material, instruction, and time. For both using or not using their home languages during the instructional unit, results show that students listed mainly individual- and group-related reasons that addressed language competencies. Furthermore, for individual-related reasons of use, language-related emotions were relevant. Implications for the implementation of a linguistically responsive learning environment are discussed based on the results.