Multilingualism in Regular Teacher Education: A Qualitative Study With Pre-Post Conversations and Learning Diaries on Reconstruction of Language-Related Notions of Normality

This paper focuses on the multilingualism in teacher education and puts a new education policy in the spotlight: the German “DaZ-Modul – German for pupils with an immigrant background,” which has been implemented as part of regular teacher training. In light of increasing linguistic diversity and transnational mobility, the potential of such a module is of particular significance. In order to analyse this potential, a qualitative study was conducted with pre-service teachers using a triangulation of pre- and post-group discussions with learning diaries. The findings offer deep insights into participants’ perceptions of linguistic normality and its reconstruction in course of the training. Drawing on these findings, the paper discusses implications for teacher education in a multilingual society: the need to include multilingual subject-oriented didactics and to combine them with reflective and biographical methods.