Research on the language attitudes and ideologies of teachers engaged in Heritage Language Instruction (HLI) in Germany is scarce even though HLI has been implemented in German schools since the early 1970s. Our goal is to fill in a gap in this field of HL pedagogy and focus on teachers’ perspectives related to language policies. We examine the ways that HL teachers’ work is shaped by specific ideological discourses that lead to bias against using HLs in school and prejudices against their speakers. We focus only on Turkish as a HL spoken in Germany, but we present findings from our case study that could theoretically apply to other HLs in Germany. We find that both explicit and more covert discrimination affect teachers’ actions and professional identity as HL teachers and persistently disrupt HLI and communication of teachers and students.
To improve teacher education for multilingual and often minoritized classrooms, we aim to find out more about future teachers' understandings of multilingualism. Using a biographical professionalization research approach, we investigate the interactions of students' biographical and academic knowledge in autobiographical texts, focusing on two minoritized students. Their texts allow to reconstruct biographical knowledge of family language policies, Heritage Language Instruction and translingual lifeworlds. They also show the students' knowledge of language ideologies that devalue multilingualism.
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