Bi-Lingual Multimedia Learning Packages — a Project for Immigrant Workers' Children

The problem

The necessity of integrating rather large numbers of migrant workers' children in the educational system of the Federal Republic of Germany has, in the last few years, presented teachers with many problems. Not prepared to meet the particular requirements of these children, the school system was rather slow in reacting to this new challenge; there was quite a delay before urgently-needed help was forthcoming from teacher training institutions and producers of learning materials. It was hoped that most of the problems would be solved once the migrant workers' children had gained enough competence in German; thus the main emphasis was placed on the development and the implementation of language learning programmes. But very soon new problems became evident. Children able to talk fluently in everyday situations tend to be faced with unexpected problems in decoding written texts, technical terms and abstract descriptions. Bernstein described a similar problem earlier on in terms of the restricted and elaborated code.