In recent years, Heritage Language Programs have been attracting more and more attention in the European academic and educational policy contexts. In Germany, many efforts are being undertaken to foster the teaching of heritage languages in schools. This paper provides an overview of the teaching of Spanish as a Heritage Language in Germany…

We analyze whether non-native speakers in the classroom affect students' educational achievement and social integration. In contrast to previous studies, which mainly examine the effect of the share of immigrant pupils, we focus on language heterogeneity by using a novel measure of the degree of linguistic diversity in the classroom. Conditional…

This paper describes and discusses findings from an explorative study on multilingualism among university staff. In a project conducted in the University of Hamburg, 661 members of staff in administrative and technical roles have participated in a survey on their multilingual repertoires, on the usage of different languages as well as multilingual…

This Event Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates auditory processing of sentences with so-called code-switches in Russian learners of German. It has often been argued that switching between two languages results in extra processing cost, although it is not completely clear yet what exactly causes these costs. ERP presents a good method to…

Existing studies on plural acquisition in German have relied on small samples and thus hardly deliver generalizable and differentiated results. Here, overgeneralizations of certain plural allomorphs and other tendencies in the acquisition of German plural markers are described on the basis of test data from 7,394 3- to 5-year-old monolingual…

The primary aim of this study was to determine whether native speakers of German living in either Canada or the Netherlands are perceived to have a foreign accent in their native German speech. German monolingual listeners (n = 19) assessed global foreign accent of 34 L1 German speakers in Anglophone Canada, 23 L1 German speakers in the Dutch…

This paper begins by looking at responses to Bernstein in Germany in the 1970s that criticized his notions of class difference in sociolinguistic codes. As part of a re-examination of Bernstein's ideas, the paper goes on to look at the current communicative situation in German education where urban schools have many second-generation immigrant…

In recent years, public discourse about German national identity has increasingly focussed on the large foreign population within Germany's borders. Whilst right-wing politicians such as Edmund Stoiber foster fears of identity loss ("Uberfremdung"), more liberal observers, and indeed the ruling red-green coalition, acknowledge that…

This paper is concerned with the impact that public and political discourses on the issues of language and ethnicity in Germany have on integration. It suggests that a combined effect of factors such as the traditional concept of "Germanness", peculiarities of Russian Germans' "cultural identity" and certain aspects of German…