Mother Tongue as a Resource for Learning German as a Language of Instruction in Austria
Authors: Olena Vasylchenko 
Published: December 2024

Background.

Since the outbreak of a large-scale war in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have found themselves in a situation of forced migration, had to adapt to the Austrian school system, learn a new foreign language and adapt to a new team and teachers. The main task of the school was to create a safe, stable and reliable environment. But at the same time, a school in Austria is a place where another language is spoken and taught, which added even more stress to the difficult situation in which Ukrainian students found themselves. In this context, the possibility of identifying, recognising and supporting the potential of a child in forced migration, which is fully reflected in the process of written or oral communication in the mother tongue, as opposed to communication in a foreign language, plays a significant role in establishing emotional and psychological balance and influences the acquisition of a new language.

Purpose.

The aim of the article is to highlight the peculiarities of interaction between the native Ukrainian language and German as a language of instruction in Austria in written communication using the tool for analysing the acquisition of early written language competence developed within the framework of the international ELA project.

Methods.

To achieve the aim of the study, the tool for analysing the acquisition of early written language competence ELA (Erfassung früher literaler Aktivitäten in Ukrainisch, Türkisch, Russisch und Deutsch) was used, which aims to identify and analyse the early bilingual or multilingual written competence of children based on samples of written texts. ELA provides an opportunity to consider the process of acquiring German as a language of instruction from a resource-based perspective and can also serve as a basis for purely scientific research. The method of elicitation was used to obtain the sample texts. The elicitation was carried out with the help of a stimulus-illustration and a stimulus-sentence formulated in Ukrainian and German.

Results.

Based on the resource-based approach to learning a foreign language, it can be stated that the mother tongue is the resource that allows us to see the child’s abilities that remain hidden if we take into account only German-language texts. The collected and analysed written samples show that more creativity and diversity in linguistic means are recorded in texts written in the mother tongue. An interesting observation was that characters and aspects that go beyond situational depiction (illustration from Serena Romanelli’s children’s book ‘Kleiner Dodo, was spielst du?’) are almost exclusively found in texts written in the mother tongue, where descriptions are much more detailed and differ from texts written in German in being more emotional and imaginative. Texts in German are shorter and have a simpler structure. In the absence of certain words, the children replaced them with their Ukrainian or English equivalents and gave proper names to animals whose names were unknown to them in German. This strategy allowed them not to remain silent and successfully complete the task. In the German-language samples, nouns that did not come at the beginning of a sentence were often written with a lowercase letter, which can be interpreted as a transfer of Ukrainian spelling to German.

The names of animals in some Ukrainian-language samples were capitalised, even if they did not appear at the beginning of the sentence. It can be assumed that these animals were perceived as the main characters of the story, or that the German spelling rules, where all nouns are capitalised, were transferred to the Ukrainian language. Very often, the main character was used in the diminutive form, which is typical for the Ukrainian language.

Discussion.

The ELA tool makes it possible to objectively assess the abilities and skills of children whose mother tongue is not German, to perceive their mother tongue as a resource and to promote the successful acquisition of German as the language of instruction in Austria. The testing of the tool for analysing the acquisition of early written competence by teachers of German as a language of instruction has allowed to change the focus and move from a monolingual (namely, German) and deficit-oriented approach to a multilingual and mother tongue-oriented approach to learning a second foreign language, which corresponds to the modern pedagogical strategy called Translanguaging, which allows students to use the entire language repertoire in solving problems.