Project leads

• Dr. Sofie Henschel

Research staff

• Dr. Anna Volodina

Student assistants

• Marcellina Charlotte Jahn
• Leon René Cyranek
• Elisabeth Weinmeister

Cooperation partners

• Prof. Dr. Birgit Heppt (Technische Universität Dortmund)
• Prof. Dr. Ilonca Hardy (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main)
• Prof. Dr. Jennifer Paetsch (Universität Bamberg)

Practice partners

• Zentrum für Sprachbildung Berlin (ZeS)

Project duration

Oct. 1, 2022 - Sept. 30, 2026

Funding agencies

• Bundesministerium für Bildung, Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMBFSFJ)

Project description

Continuous language education has the potential to strengthen multi-professional cooperation in full-day school settings, across both formal and informal learning contexts. This is where the interdisciplinary project “Multi-professional cooperation and professionalisation for subject related language teaching in all-day schools” (KoPaS) comes in. It is funded under the BMBF programme “Sprachliche Bildung in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft: Individuelle Potenziale entwickeln und Übergänge gestalten“ (Language Eevelopment in a Society Shaped by Immigration: Developing Individual Potential and Supporting Transition). The project aims to support language development and subject learning among primary school students in Years 3 and 4 over the course of one academic year. It draws on approaches to language sensitive teaching that have already been evaluated, and explicitly takes multilingual students’ first languages into account in full-day school settings. A contextualised approach to language education can be supported by exploring Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) as a connected theme from multiple perspectives across full-day school settings, in both formal and informal learning contexts (Arnoldt, 2011).

The project uses a quasi-experimental design with a control group and three study conditions in Bavaria, Berlin, and Hesse. It is structured in three phases: development and piloting, professional development and evaluation, and finally consolidation and transfer. During the development and piloting phase, teaching units on key ESD themes are selected and adapted. These units can be used in “Sachunterricht” (general studies) and across subjects. All participating teachers and pedagogical staff have access to the teaching materials. The teaching units build on materials by WordGeneration (Jones et al., 2019), and on piloted resources from the ProSach project („Professionalisierungsmaßnahmen zur bedeutungsfokussierten Sprachförderung im Sachunterricht der Grundschule“; Henschel et al., 2020). These materials are further developed, including elements that explicitly address multilingualism. The teaching units allow the themes to be taken forward in a project-based way in afternoon activities, making use of digital media (e.g. learning apps and videos) and out-of-school activities included through practice cooperations. Supplementary guidelines and video tutorials support the implementation of the learning activities and help strengthen collaboration between teachers and pedagogical staff.

In the subsequent professional development and evaluation phase, teachers and educational staff from both experimental groups take part in professional development sessions on subject-specific language education. These sessions build on the professional development programme on linguistic scaffolding based on Gibbons (2002), which was developed and evaluated in the ProSach project (Gabler et al., 2020; Heppt et al., 2022). The programme is adapted for the project, and one of the groups also covers additional elements of multilingual pedagogy. The selection, coordination, and implementation of coordinated educational activities take place through tandems of teachers and pedagogical staff. The impact of the professional development measures is examined in terms of cognitive, motivational, and emotional outcomes for teachers, pedagogical staff, and students, as well as at the level of implementation processes. The analysis draws on the participating students’ VERA results to assess transfer effects.

In the consolidation and transfer phase, close collaboration with the participating schools and external experts (e.g. from state-level institutes) helps identify success factors for cooperation between schools and afternoon activities. This phase also focuses on developing strategies to embed the approach, building on existing partnerships and involving additional local education partners. The plans for this phase include one-day in-school training sessions for selected schools, as well as cross-school peer consultation through a school network. The project findings are prepared in a practice-oriented way and made available for use in full-day schools. The teaching materials developed and evaluated as part of the project will be made available as Open Educational Resources (OER) via the mundo.schule platform.