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“Interculturality and Multilingualism – an Opportunity”
Building Bridges with Language
The first-grade children at Landeck-Perjen primary school take turns wearing a blindfold and guessing what object they have in their hands – a pencil, an apple, a bear?
The children are delighted when they guess correctly, and even more delighted when they also know what the object is called in different languages.
The learning project, in which kindergarten children join the grade-school children at the school twice a week, is called “Building Bridges with Language”. All the children profit. Reinforcing their grasp of their mother tongue strengthens their self-confidence, and getting acquainted with another language helps them relate better to everyday life. “You can see how proud the children are of their forms of expression,” says the teacher Christina Salhofer, “and how using different languages together has a positive effect on their sense of solidarity. They feel accepted by one another and get along beautifully. It also facilitates the transition from kindergarten to school.”
Multilingualism is an opportunity for everyone – for children whose first language is German and for those with a different first language. In order to take the best advantage of this opportunity, the right kind of teaching must begin at as early an age as possible.
The school initiative “Interculturality and Multilingualism – an Opportunity”, introduced by the Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture and implemented by KKA, offers a way to encourage children’s interest in languages and let them experience multilingualism in a positive way.
The programme helps pupils learn how to deal productively with diversity and difference and contributes to implementing the principles of “intercultural learning”. The programme is being carried out for the fourth time and has attracted wide interest: since 2006, 430 projects have been submitted by schools all over Austria and 259 of them have received subsidies.
At the Landeck-Perjen primary school, language learning is closely associated with doing things together. With children, reinforcing and consolidating newly learned material is most easily done through processes of playful learning, learning with all the senses and encouraging children to tell about their own worlds. For this reason, the two teachers Christina Salhofer and Christina Zangerl also consider it important for the children to find out about other ways of living, which gives them the chance to see the diversity of their own backgrounds as something valuable.
