Preparing Teachers to Foster Multilingual Literacy

Abstract

Having been overlooked for a long time, the importance of literacy competence for successful participation in education is currently gaining attention and practical implementation in many countries. However, despite the linguistic diversity of the classrooms and the so-called multilingual turn in research, the fostering of literacy skills often continues to focus on the monolingual perspective of the majority language, thus overlooking vast multilingual potential. This approach is rooted at different levels of the educational systems. For teachers, who play a key role in promoting literacy development, this is partially due to respective monolingual orientation in teacher education and a lack of (systematic) implementation of applicable methods and examples. This chapter addresses this issue by presenting a synopsis of possible approaches of preparing teachers to foster multilingual literacy. Although all this is done using Germany as an example, the elements can be transferred to other contexts and formats of teacher training courses.