The prevalence of bilingual interaction in peer-learning

ABSTRACT

In an era of globalization and global migration multilingualism represents a central educational goal for international political institutions and educational systems. However, except for bilingual schooling programs, institutionalized learning usually takes place monolingually, especially in Europe. Peer-Learning seems to be a promising method for integrating bilingualism in submersion. Pupils sharing the same languages could interact bilingually while working together without the necessity of a bilingual teacher.

This paper investigates the prevalence of bilingual interaction of peer-tandems in submersion. The analysis is based upon a quasi-experimental setting with n = 114 Turkish-German bilingual pupils from German elementary schools and makes use of dyadic data analysis and non-parametric methods. The results show that (1) the prevalence of bilingual interaction is nonindependent of the dyad, (2) the learning contents do not affect the prevalence of bilingual interaction, and (3) an explicit offer is needed for the activation of bilingual interaction. Practical implications for the implementation of bilingual peer-learning in submersion will be discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• translanguaging
• peer-learning
• Primary school
• submersion
• dyadic data analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Age of acquisition and language use at home were assessed via standardised telephone interviews with the student’s mother or father.

2 This includes also turns solely produced in Turkish too. Nonetheless, these turns are labelled “bilingual interaction”, because the base language in the intervention is still German.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung fuer Bildung und Forschung: [grant number 01JM1404].