„Sie dürfen sich nicht auf ihrer Muttersprache unterhalten und das finde ich tatsächlich auch gut“ – Sprachbezogene Diskriminierung in der Grundschule

The aim of the study is to uncover potential linguistic beliefs based on descriptions and reasons given by teachers on how they deal with multilingualism to reveal structures that may have disadvantageous effects on multilingual children. To this end, qualitative, vignette-based interviews from the DFG-funded BLUME II-vignettstudy with 43 in-service primary school teachers were evaluated. The content analysis revealed eight key themes that were compressed to four justifications for the exclusion of family languages: Teachers legitimize the exclusion of family languages in the classroom with their own limited or non-existent language skills. Furthermore, the teachers legitimize the exclusion of multilingual children from lesson planning with the diversity of family languages within the class and by seeing a command of German as a prerequisite for successful social integration. Language bans, to which the teachers largely feel committed, are named as a further legitimization. When describing the results, the many language-related attributions of deficits and problematizations and the fact that all legitimizations are externalizations are striking. The results point to the key role of primary school teachers in the reproduction of language-related discrimination and encourage us to critically question subjective justifications and argumentation patterns for potential linguistic practices in everyday primary school life in order to better understand how language-related discrimination can be prevented.