These are the reasons – Study: Students complain about German support lessons

For the study, 78 students from groups 5 to 9 were interviewed in May and June. The majority of them had only come to Austria a few months ago through family reunification; some had at best limited access to formal educational institutions in their countries of origin and therefore could not read and write in their native language.

Most students came to Vienna through family reunification
Thanks to family reunification alone, a total of around 300 children and young people came to Vienna’s schools every month.

Various previous experiences and skills
The result: In the German support classes, in which the young people are taught individually in German for 15 to 20 hours per week for up to four semesters, there are young people with increasingly different previous experiences and skills, which, according to Schwab, poses new challenges for teachers. She is concerned about the exclusion reported by interviewees and the effects of the separate German support classes on the academic development of young people.

Lack of connection with teachers
Although the quality of teaching and the social climate in the German remedial classroom are largely assessed positively, according to the research, many young people feel left out of their regular classroom: they have little or no connection with the teachers there, who do not accept students with less German knowledge into account when teaching and at the same time have lower expectations for their performance than the teachers in the German support class. Due to separate lessons in the German support class, these young people also miss important content in other subjects.

Few points of contact with classmates
There are few points of contact with classmates in the regular classroom, with whom the interviewees only teach together in subjects such as crafts, music or gymnastics. “No one talks to us and we don’t talk to them,” reads a quote in the study. In the descriptions of the young people, there is “a clear separation” into groups based on language skills and national origin.

German-speaking role models are lacking
At the same time, respondents discussed that it was not possible to learn German so quickly in the separate support class because there were no German-speaking role models there. According to the research, young people tend to adopt linguistic commands and prohibitions and often justify this by saying that they would learn faster if they were only allowed to speak German. The motives for learning German are ‘to be like the others’ or to help the family.

School staff are overwhelmed
Overall, the research results for Schwab once again show that school staff are becoming increasingly overwhelmed: there is a lack of comprehensive training and in-service programs that prepare teachers for linguistically heterogeneous classrooms, as well as associated teaching materials. Multilingualism must finally be recognized as a valuable resource, Schwab demands.

The separate German language support classes have been criticized from academia and practice since their introduction, partly because the students involved would be excluded and language education would be made more difficult without German-speaking role models.

More freedom of choice for schools was demanded
In an evaluation survey commissioned by the Ministry of Education among 700 teachers and school administrators, the majority advocated that the school itself should decide how German should be taught. In fact, such separate support classes should be set up for groups of eight or more students per location. However, Schwab showed in an earlier study that some schools do not adhere to this requirement due to a lack of necessary classrooms or teachers.