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Changing teachers' attitudes towards linguistic diversity: effects of an anti-

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Article  in  International Journal of Applied Linguistics · January 2015

DOI: 10.1111/ijal.12121

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 Authors’ copy; final version in:
International Journal of Applied1 Linguistics;
DOI: 10.1111/ijal.12121

Changing teachers’ attitudes towards linguistic diversity:

Effects of an antibias programme
Heike Wiese*, Katharina Mayr*, Philipp Krämer+, Patrick Seeger*,
Hans-Georg Müller*, Verena Mezger*
+
* University of Potsdam Free University of Berlin

Abstract
We discuss an intervention programme for kindergarten and school teachers’ continuing
education in Germany that targets biases against language outside a perceived
monolingual ‘standard’ and its speakers (www.deutsch-ist-vielseitig.de). The programme
combines antibias methods relating to linguistic diversity with objectives of raising
critical language awareness. Evaluation through teachers’ workshops in Berlin and
Brandenburg points to positive and enduring attitudinal changes in participants, but not in
control groups that did not attend workshops, and effects were independent of personal
variables gender and teaching subject and only weakly associated with age. We relate
these effects to such programme features as indirect and inclusive methods that foster
active engagement, and the combination of ‘safer’ topics targeting attitudes towards
linguistic structures with more challenging ones dealing with the discrimination of
speakers.

Key words: antibias, critical language awareness, language & education in multilingual
settings, language attitudes, linguistic discrimination

Zusammenfassung
Der Beitrag diskutiert ein Interventionsprogramm für die Weiterbildung von
Lehrer/inne/n und Erzieher/inne/n, das Vorurteile gegenüber sprachlichen Praktiken
außerhalb eines vermeintlichen monolingualen „Standarddeutschen“ und seinen
Sprecher/inne/n fokussiert (www.deutsch-ist-vielseitig.de). Das Programm verbindet
Antibias-Methoden zur sprachlichen Vielfalt mit solchen, die auf eine Verstärkung
kritischer Sprachbewusstheit abheben. Die Evaluation der Materialien in
Lehrerfortbildungen in Berlin und Brandenburg weist auf positive und anhaltende
Einstellungsveränderungen bei den Teilnehmer/inne/n, aber nicht bei Mitgliedern einer
Kontrollgruppe, die nicht an den Fortbildungen teilnahm; die Effekte waren unabhängig
von den personenbezogen Variablen Geschlecht und Lehrfach und nur schwach mit Alter
assoziiert. Wir diskutieren diese Effekte im Zusammenhang mit Eigenschaften des
Programms wie der Verwendung indirekter und inklusiver Methoden, die eine aktive
Auseinandersetzung fördern, und der Verbindung von weniger „bedrohlichen“ Themen,
die sich auf Einstellungen gegenüber sprachlichen Strukturen beziehen, mit solchen, die
die Diskrimierung von Sprecher/inne/n behandeln und daher eine größere
Herausforderung darstellen.
Schlüsselwörter: Antibias, kritische Sprachbewusstheit, Sprache & Bildung in
mehrsprachigen Kontexten, Spracheinstellungen, sprachliche Diskriminierung
 2

1 Introduction: Linguistic diversity in the classroom

Modern Europe is characterised by linguistically diverse urban neighbourhoods that give
rise to new linguistic repertoires, a wealth of different multilingual competences, and new
developments in heritage and majority languages.1 This increased linguistic diversity is
reflected in the classroom, where we find a large range of formal and informal styles and
registers, associated with majority and minority languages in different situations and
social contexts. In their linguistic behaviour, pupils draw accordingly on a multitude of
different resources making up complex linguistic repertoires.
Curricular framework specifications for schools in Germany do acknowledge such
repertoires, and take into account different communicative choices including nonstandard
language use. However, this does not necessarily translate into a classroom reality where
competences in domains other than an idealised monolingual “standard German” are
acknowledged and appreciated.
In this paper, we discuss results from a programme designed to target this issue by
counteracting attitudes in teachers that lead to negative stereotypisations and devaluations
of language use and speakers. In what follows, we first describe the kind of negative
attitudes that can be found at schools, and discuss existing intervention programmes
(section 2). Against this background, we argue for an antibias programme for teachers’
education that targets the linguistic realm, and describe the model we designed for
Germany (section 3), and then analyse the effects we found for it in applications in Berlin
and Brandenburg (section 4). The final section (section 5) summarises our results and
provides an outlook on future work.

2 Negative attitudes towards language variation and nonstandard language in

education
Rather than acknowledging the breadth of speakers’ repertoires, formal education
overwhelmingly relies on testing instruments that measure only part of their language
competence, and disregards or devaluates linguistic domains outside a monolingual
‘standard’ language (Blommaert & Backus 2011). Even if teachers are aware of linguistic
diversity, they often do not know how to handle it, and so ignore the specific
competences and needs of multilingual and bidialectal children, thus frustrating a central
goal in democratic societies, namely equal access to education for all (Young 2012).

2.1 The situation in Germany

Linguistic attitudes and language-related interactions in classrooms in Germany are
embedded in a general context of negative attitudes towards language variation and
diversity. Multilinguals are considered to be outside the norm, and migrants of heritage
languages other than German are expected to suppress or conceal their linguistic
background (e.g., Krumm 2009). In addition to this, we find a general trend towards a
more standardised spoken language, with a widespread loss of traditional regional
dialects, which tend to be regarded as indices of older generations and lower social
classes and commonly avoided in public and formal situations (e.g., Stoeckle &
Svenstrup 2011). We can identify three main factors contributing to this negative climate
for linguistic diversity: (1) public discourse in Germany is dominated by a standard
language ideology (Milroy & Milroy 1999, Vogl 2012) that might be particularly strong
 3

here (Davies 2012, Hüning 2013); (2) it is characterised by a monolingual bias (Gogolin
1994) leading, e.g., to widespread beliefs in “double semilingualism” for speakers with
heritage languages of low social prestige (Wiese 2011) and a strong association of
‘migration background’ with ‘in need of special language support’ (cf. Scarvaglieri &
Zech 2013); and (3) this is further augmented by pervasive ‘us’/‘them’-dichotomies
targeting social class and ‘ethnicity’ (Wiese to appear; cf. also Androutsopoulos 2007 on
representations of ‘ethnolects’).
Against this background, it is not surprising to find that educational institutions
are often ill-equipped to handle linguistic (and social) diversity in the classroom. As in
the European Union in general, we find a marked discrepancy in Germany between
official education policies and the everyday practices in schools towards students'
heritage languages, with assimilation still the favored option and an orientation towards a
monolingual norm even where public rhetoric embraces multilingualism (Neumann 2009,
Steinbach 2009, Allemann-Ghionda et al 2010, Gogolin & Salem 2014). In line with this,
international comparative studies show that children from migrant families are
considerably disadvantaged in the German education system (cf. Geißler & Weber-
Menges 2008, Steinbach 2009, Fereidooni 2011).
The language of instruction, that is, an academic register of German, is expected
to be in place as a natural basic equipment of students, which strongly favours middle-
class children. Monolingual and multilingual students alike who do not grow up in
pronounced literate environments and are not familiar with academic German are not
systematically introduced to it in class, even though it is essential for school career (cf.,
e.g., Cathomas 2005, Schroeder 2007, Wiese 2012). Non-standard forms can evoke class
prejudices among teachers and fellow students, and children socialised with standard
language get significantly better grades, not only in the subject German (cf. Barbour &
Stevenson 1990). Teachers tend to focus exclusively on standard German competences,
disregarding other linguistic resources, and this neglect can lead to negative linguistic
stereotyping: multilingual practices and nonstandard language use is then often regarded
as evidence for a lack of linguistic proficiency independently of the speech situation; it is
perceived as an indication of low social class and, associated with this, of a lesser
academic potential (e.g., Davies 2000, Steinbach 2009, Hüning 2013; cf. Krumm 2009
for Austria).
This is true for traditional vernaculars and regional dialects as well as linguistic
practices associated with multilingual contexts, such as code-switching and new urban
vernaculars or (multi-)ethnolects (cf. Keim 2010 for an overview). In the case of
multilingual pupils with heritage languages of low social prestige, negative class
prejudices can be further supplemented by the construction of alloethnic, non-German
outgroups (Wiese to appear). As Gogolin (2009), Gogolin & Salem (2014) show,
teachers tend to use different strategies of addressing students with and without migration
background, reflecting a reduction of aspirations and complexity when addressing the
former, which can have negative effects on students' self-conceptions as successful
learners and on their chances to acquire subject-specific and academic language skills. In
our work with different schools throughout Germany, we found that it is not unusual for
school and kindergarten teachers to call only children with a monolingual, non-migrant
background “German”, while bilingual children will be labelled “Turkish”, “Arabic” etc.,
even if they (and often also their parents) have been living in Germany all their lives (cf.
 4

also Artamonova to appear on the construction of alloethnic categories in class; Weber

2003 on the reciprocity of cultural ascriptions or stereotypes in teacher-student
interactions).
In the context of the present study, teachers told us, for instance, that they asked
their bilingual pupils whether they had “any German friends”, or requested them to fill in
a questionnaire where they had to indicate whether the language they spoke at home was
either “German” or their “mother language”, precluding both the possibility that pupils
who have grown up in Germany could regard German as their mother language (or one of
two mother languages), and that people could speak more than one language at home.
(1) and (2) illustrate the reduced view of linguistic competences and the social
and ethnic stereotyping one can find in the classroom, with quotes from emails by
teachers received in connection with the ongoing public debate on “Kiezdeutsch”
‘(neighbour-)hood German’, a new dialect of German that has developed in multilingual
urban neighbourhoods (Wiese 2009, 2012):2
(1) My experiences show a steady decrease of pupils’ linguistic competence in written
as well as in oral domains. Causes: Hardly any book reading anymore. Writing
primarily in SMS style. Sociolect, youth language, or whatever one wants to call
it, as an expansion of one’s language skills – fine! For my pupils, it is not an
expansion, but their core competence, if one can call it that.
KiDKo/E, Email, 19/06/2011
(2) Kiezdeutsch is […] an amalgam of new vocabulary (lol) from other cultures with
the economical syntax of all those who are not up to using the genitive. […] But
why do young Germans, in conversations with Germans of the same age, speak
Kiez language? KiDKo/E, Email, 15/03/2012

2.2 Existing intervention programmes

The patterns of social and linguistic devaluation we find here are not limited to Germany,
and the programme we investigate here builds on a number of intervention programmes
developed for other countries. A well-established case in point are dialect awareness
programmes such as, e.g., in ‘The North Carolina Language and Life Project’ (Wolfram
1993; Reaser & Wolfram 2006; Reaser 2006), a state-based curriculum for middle school
students on language variation that covers both regional and social dialects. An example
from Japan is presented in Yoshimura (2011) who conducted a language awareness
project in primary schools. For the domain of multilingualism and heritage languages,
Pomphrey & Burley (2009) show how enhancement of language awareness can help
reduce the boundaries that teachers believe to exist between students’ first language(s)
and second language(s) they learn at school, enabling them to support a positive linguistic
self-image for students in L2 acquisition as well.
In a similar vein, a number of programmes support linguistic landscape
explorations for school and university students (e.g., Dagenais et al. 2009 for Canada;
Hancock 2012 for the UK), or promote the integration of home languages and dialects
into the classroom (e.g., Malcolm & Truscott 2012 for Australia). Other programmes
focus on specific nonstandard varieties, for instance, the ‘Code-Switching’ programme
(Wheeler & Swords 2006; 2010) developed to teach standard English in urban
classrooms in the US through contrastive linguistic training materials for AAVE, or the
‘Linguistic Innovators’ materials for classroom units about Multilingual London English
 5

in the UK (Cheshire et al. 2011; cf. Gardner-Chloros 2011 for an adaptation to

Multilingual Paris French in France).
A common feature of these programmes is their focus on classroom materials:
their main target group are pupils. By implementing such classroom materials in their
teaching, teachers will also benefit from the programme, albeit indirectly: teaching
something to others can be an effective way to internalise its contents (cf. Reaser 2007,
Yoshimura 2011). And as a study on dialect-based teacher instruction by Sweetland
(2010) demonstrates, teachers are more likely to permanently adopt a change in attitudes
if they are given the opportunity to put new ways of thinking and/or talking about
language to practice in their classroom. However, in order to be willing to use such
materials in the first place, and for their message to reach their pupils, teachers need some
openness to linguistic diversity; ideally, they will also be aware of possible social and
linguistic prejudices they might hold themselves.
The programme we are investigating here tackles this issue by focussing on
teachers first: teachers are the primary target group, while classroom materials are a
secondary package, to be implemented by teachers after they have gone through
linguistic diversity training. In this respect, the programme is similar to materials
developed by Garcia (2008) as part of teacher education curricula in college that promote
awareness of multilingualism. For this domain, Lee & Oxelson (2006) showed how
teacher training and the resulting improvement of attitudes can also positively affect
students‘ perception and use of their heritage language competence.
While the materials we discuss here have also been applied in teachers’ education
at university, their primary implementation is in continuing education of teachers who are
currently teaching at schools, thus reaching not only prospective teachers, but also
experienced ones who might have built up certain negative patterns over their
professional practice. As the OECD study “Teachers Matter” (2005) showed, there is a
need for substantial improvements in teachers’ education in general and for a greater
focus on teachers’ continuing education in particular. In the past, the focus on teachers’
education in Germany has mostly been on earlier stages, namely the first and second
(university studies and trainee) phases of teacher education (cf. Müller et al. 2010), even
though later interventions have been shown to be particularly promising (cf. Lipowsky
2010). It is therefore this third stage, teachers’ continuing education, that the programme
we discuss here targets.

3 “The many sides of German”: a programme for teachers’ education

Under the theme ‘The many sides of German’, we developed a language-directed anti-
bias programme for teachers’ continuing education in cooperation with the Berlin Senate
for Education, Youth and Science; the Clinic “Integration through Education” Berlin; and
partners from two schools and a kindergarten in Berlin-Kreuzberg, a linguistically diverse
inner-city neighbourhood.

3.1 Methodological perspective

The programme implements some methods from existing programmes, such as dialect
awareness materials, linguistic landscape excursions, and contrastive linguistic
explorations in both the core materials for teachers and the additional classroom
materials. However, aiming at negative preconceptions and stereotypisations of different
 6

populations, it mainly draws on the methodological and didactic domain of antibias and
antiracism pedagogics. It is distinctive in that it tackles such biases on the linguistic plane
where they target speakers and speech communities via their language use. To our
knowledge, it is the first programme to realise such a synergy.
In taking an antibias perspective, the programme follows a pedagogical concept
for dealing with cultural diversity, where ‘anti’ refers to an active commitment against
discrimination and ‘bias’ refers to “any attitude, belief and feeling that results in, and
helps to justify, unfair treatment of an individual because of his or her identity” (Derman-
Sparks 1989:3; cf. also Derman-Sparks & Ramsey 2006). Accordingly, an antibias
curriculum is focused on attitudes, with a goal towards respecting and embracing
differences and avoiding discrimination. In Germany, the group “Fachstelle
Kinderwelten” (“Children's Worlds”) adapted the antibias approach for the German
context (cf. Preissing 2003, Wagner 2013); for applications with adults in Germany cf.
Gramelt (2010); Anti-Bias-Werkstatt & Europahaus Aurich (2007).
The intervention programme we present here implements such an approach for
dealing with linguistic diversity. It forces critical thinking and problem solving through
teachers’ training and classroom materials that tackle negative attitudes towards linguistic
practices and underprivileged speakers and speech communities. The discrimination it
aims to reduce is hence one that is located at and/or mediated via the linguistic plane,
colouring perceptions of students’ accomplishments in class, obscuring their
competences, thus undermining their linguistic and academic self-image and ultimately
their access to education and social participation. As such, the programme is designed to
address inequalities translated by language ideology and mediated through language use
and meta-linguistic discourse, and thus to reshape sociolinguistic realities.
In its focus on language, the programme is in accordance with critical language
awareness approaches as developed by Fairclough (1992, 2001): it intends to call
attention to the relationship between language and social power structures and to the role
teachers have in shaping and/or perpetuating these relationships (e.g., Fairclough 1992,
1995, 2001:193-202; Svalberg 2007). Within a broad thematic coverage (see below), it
links up structural grammatical awareness and metalinguistic knowledge of language
acquisition with knowledge about the social meaning of language (cf. also Murray 2003),
thus bringing together different foci in the development of language awareness theory. An
increased critical language awareness in teachers can also transfer to their students,
improving students’ language learning potential and language attitudes and help them
develop a positive linguistic self-image. Thus, teachers’ critical language awareness can
fulfill both an instrumental and an emancipatory function when implemented in their
classroom interactions (Knapp-Potthoff 1997; Widdowson 1997). In the current
programme, this is further supported by complementary materials for classroom
applications.
The programme’s general design corresponds to well-established approaches to
teacher training touching three dimensions: Teacher training is a cognitive process
(“What do I know?”), a personal construction (“What is my role / impact?”), and a
reflective practice (“What is happening to me and to the world around me?”), and the
materials address both established cognitive processes of knowledge input, namely
learning and acquisition (cf. Andrews 2007).
 7

For one, the training aims to make implicit knowledge explicit, to enhance it,
possibly challenge and change it, and feed it back into implicit knowledge. Second, the
materials also target implicit knowledge through participants’ experiences in the
workshops and their personal involvement during training.
Following common views of attitudes as psychological tendencies to evaluate a
particular attitude object, with cognitive, affective, and behavioral components (cf.
Rosenberg & Hovland 1960; Eagly & Chaiken 1993), materials address three levels. At
the cognitive level, they enhance knowledge about the systematicity of ‘nonstandard’
language, the linguistic realities of ‘nonstandard’ speakers and the breadth of their
linguistic repertoires, and about the close ties between attitudes towards ways of speaking
and those towards certain groups of people (cf. Preston 2002). The affective level is
targeted through materials that involve roleplay and perspective shifts, support a
reflection of one’s own discrimination experiences, or help uncover sociolinguistic
stereotyping and biases towards others. Behavioural changes are stimulated by training
new patterns of sociolinguistic interactions and schoolroom practices.

3.2 General features

The programme offers materials for three different target groups: kindergarten teachers,
primary school teachers, and secondary school teachers. Materials are organised into
three modules:
- D1, Speaker Perception: I hear who you are. Attitudes towards different ways of
speaking and speech communities.
- D2, Language Use: Who speaks what? The repertoire of speakers.
- D3, Language System, Development, and Change: What is German? The gamut of
a language.
Within these modules, materials address a diverse selection of topics intended to cover a
broad range of phenomena outside a monolingual ‘standard’ language that were identified
in project clinics with the school and kindergarten partners, such as spoken vs. written
language, traditional dialects, vernaculars, urban language, youth culture, language
change, multilingualism, language repertoires, standard language ideologies, linguistic
stereotyping, and social prejudices. Materials are differentiated for two teaching phases,
“Motivation and Introduction” (I), and “Development and Expansion” (II), a warming-up
block at the beginning, a transition period between Phases I and II, and a wrapping-up
block at the end. The programme has a modular structure that enables trainers to pick and
choose and combine different materials depending on thematic focus, target group, and
workshop length. It offers a comprehensive package (available for download from a
service website), with a trainer handbook including detailed workflow schedules in a
format that potential trainers (who are usually school teachers themselves) are familiar
with from school; concrete materials with slides, work sheets, exercises, audios, videos,
and summary leaflets with take-home messages.
The language examples in the materials involve a range of authentic data, aiming
to making the materials more interesting and credible. As piloting of the materials at
different schools showed, examples illustrating the breadth of young people’s repertoires
can also help overcome a common challenge: teachers often have a reduced view of their
pupils’ linguistic competences, and frequently voiced the opinion that pupils could not
switch to more standard-close registers, for instance when discussing informal vs. formal
 8

language use. In one case, this happened even when the linguistic samples used in the
materials were in fact from pupils from that same school: the unit illustrated written
repertoires with text messages and formal reports written by pupils (unit ‘Language
Situations’). One of the participants dismissed the relevance of this for her own school,
maintaining
(3) “The problem is, our pupils write a report like a text message.”3
By using authentic materials, the programme aims to counteract such prejudices against
pupils’ competences.
For each unit, there is also material for classroom applications, as a service
package for teachers to use in their own teaching at school. For one, as discussed above,
applying materials in the classroom can further support a potential positive change in
attitude in teachers. In addition, the inclusion of such materials has also a practical goal:
as piloting the materials showed, this service makes the workshop more attractive for
teachers; they are more willing to participate in a workshop that has the promise to offer
practical support for their classroom teaching afterwards..
A general challenge to be expected in an antibias programme is a potential clash
between messages in the workshop and teachers’ self-images. The materials account for
this by taking, as much as possible, an indirect and non-threatening approach to attitudes.
One way they do this is by starting with scenarios that do not hit too close to home, e.g.,
in one unit (‘A New School’) teachers are asked to speculate what the chances for some
pupils would be to get a place at a neighbouring school, rather than at their own school.
Another way, followed by some materials, is to make participants notice possible effects
of their negative attitudes in covert trials that adapt techniques from psychological
studies. The positive effect such an approach can have is illustrated in a comment a
teacher made during a training session:
(4) “It is shocking to see how one’s memory can be deceptive at times, and how much
stereotypes can take effect then.”
In addition, several materials support the inclusion of teachers’ own biographies and
possible discrimination experiences, in order to foster empathy, help teachers re-evaluate
their own experiences and relate them to those of their pupils.
A comprehensive description of the units, including English summaries, can be
found on the programme’s website.

4 Teaching teachers: outcomes of the programme

The materials were first piloted with partner schools and kindergartens in Berlin, leading
to some modifications and further adaptations towards the target groups. In order to test
the programme’s effectiveness, we then applied the materials in teachers’ workshops in
Berlin and the neighbouring state of Brandenburg, Germany. In what follows, we report
on results for school materials.

4.1 Investigating attitudes: set-up of the study

We applied the materials in altogether 9 workshops with 86 teachers from 12 institutions.
Most of the schools were secondary schools offering qualifications for admission to
tertiary education (similar to A-levels); two schools offered integrated education with on-
the-job professional training. Two workshops, with different groups of teachers, were
conducted at a primary school. Most of the schools were in multiethnic inner-city
 9

neighbourhoods of Berlin; one was in a mostly monoethnic middle-class neighbourhood

in south-west Berlin. In addition, we conducted a workshop for teachers from secondary
and primary schools in different towns of Brandenburg. Materials were applied in
different selections and combinations, custom-tailored for participant groups and schools.
Each unit was tested at least twice and in different combinations, and each workshop
employed materials from at least two modules.
We evaluated the effectiveness of the programme following a general definition of
evaluation as “comparing the actual and real with the predicted or promised” (James &
Roffe 2000:12). Here, the intended effect is a positive change in teachers’ attitudes
towards language and language users outside a perceived monolingual standard.
Accordingly, the evaluation intended to measure attitudinal changes in the participants.
Since attitudes are basically “hypothetical construct[s]” (Eagly & Chaiken 1993:2) that
cannot be verified through direct observation, we can measure them only indirectly
through positive or negative responses to stimuli or (dis-)agreements to evaluative
statements (cf. Eagly & Chaiken 1993; Bohner & Wänke 2002; Maio & Haddock 2010
for an overview). For our study, we used Likert-type rating scales in a questionnaire and
asked participants to indicate the degree of their agreement or disagreement to language-
related statements. For their responses, they had a choice of 4 boxes indicating
evaluations from “totally disagree” to “totally agree”. The questionnaire contained 19
statements falling into six different thematic domains, with different weights reflecting
the programme’s foci:
 Language repertoires (7 statements),
 Multilingualism (4 statements),
 Traditional dialects (2 statements),
 Other non-standard language use (youth language, informal spoken language,
texting) (3 statements),
 Language change (2 statements),
 Social strata (1 statement).
Contents of the statements were based on field notes from discussion groups with
teachers. Six of the statements expressed more positive, the others more negative
attitudes. (5) illustrates each of the thematic domains:
(5)
(a) I speak different kinds of German, depending on the situation.
(b) It is a sign of a reduced lexicon if young people in a conversation change back
and forth between two languages.
(c) Dialects have a complex grammar of their own, just like standard German.
(d) Messages like SMS or Twitter are detrimental to grammar and spelling, because
the reduction leads to incorrect German.
(e) The German language is deteriorating.
(f) Children from a lower social class don’t speak German so well.
In addition, the questionnaire contained questions on age, gender, teaching subject, and
languages and dialects spoken. Each participant filled in the questionnaire three times:
directly before the workshop (pre-test), directly after the workshop (post-test), and
several months after the workshop (post-post-test). This tripartite procedure is similar to
 10

an ‘interrupted time series design’ (Steiner et al. 2009); it enabled us to measure

immediate effects of the training through possible changes between the first and the
second round, and longer-term effects through comparison with the responses from the
third round. In order to indicate whether effects were related to the training, and not just
general results of learning as time passes, we ran the same questionnaire with a control
group of teachers for each training who were from the same school as the participants,
but did not attend the workshop. Teachers from the control group filled in the
questionnaire twice: first at the time of the workshop (pre-test), and then several months
afterwards, at the same time as the test group (post-post-test). Altogether, we tested 73
teachers in the control group.

4.2 Results of the evaluation

For our analysis, we assumed Likert scales with equidistances. That means that we treat
the data as interval-scaled, which could be regarded as a methodical simplification. This
decision was caused by three main reasons: (1) The assumption of interval-scaled data
within questionnaire designs is not only best practice in contemporary social science, but
has also been proven robust in comparison with statistical techniques considering rating
scales as ordinal (see Jaccard and Wan 1996; Labovitz 1967, 1970; Kim 1975; for an
opposing view, though, see Wilson 1971). (2) The rating values for each statement were
designed similarly, making an assumption of equal threshold distances in each statement
highly plausible. (3) Even in scaling techniques considering ordinal scales (such as rating
scale models in Item Response Theory), aggregated variables such as personal parameters
are estimated on the basis of sum scores. That means that the main difference between
rating scale models and models with the assumption of interval scales is whether the sum
scores themselves are ordinal or interval scaled. For that reason, we compared the
outcome of the t-tests reported below with the results of nonparametric tests. We found
no relevant differences, which indicates that the assumption of Likert scales can be
maintained.
Return figures for questionnaires were relatively high. From 86 workshop
participants and 73 control group members altogether, all completed the pre-test, and all
workshop participants completed the post-test. For the post-post-test, which was
conducted with both groups again, we got altogether 64 completed questionnaires, 44
from workshop participants and 20 from control group members. That we got fewer
returns for this test than for the others was to be expected, given that pre-test and post-test
were conducted together with the workshops, whereas the post-post-test was to be filled
in several months after. The anonymity of teachers completing the questionnaire
presented a further challenge: in order to support candid answers,4 we ensured total
anonymity and did not record names anywhere; questionnaires were exclusively matched
through codes that participants generated. As a result, we had no means to reach
participants and control group members individually after the workshop, but had to rely
on their willingness to send back the questionnaire to us anonymously after the agreed
period of time. Against this background, the return of 40% of the questionnaires in the
post-post-test can be considered good. Unfortunately, we lost some data, partly because
of incomplete questionnaires (with half or more of the questions not filled in) and partly
because of missing or non-matching codes, possibly because participants forgot to fill in
their code at one of the run-throughs, or did not follow the instructions on generating the
 11

codes each time. Given the complete anonymity, these questionnaires had to be excluded,
leaving us with altogether 149 data sets for the pre-test (workshop participants: 81 /
control group members: 68), 81 in the post-test, and 38 in the post-post-test (25 / 13).

Main effects
The first step of data analysis was to reformat the data to all positive scales. The
summation of those scales then indicates the value of general positive attitudes towards
language diversity. Figure 1 shows the means of those general positive attitudes in test
and control group and in the different rounds of data collection.5

Figure 1: Means of positive attitudes

As the figure shows, the positive attitude values in the test group increase from pre-test to
post-test and to post-post-test. A t-test showed the differences between pre-test and post-
test in the test group to be highly significant (N=81, t = -5.863, p=.000) as well as the
differences between pre-test and post-post-test (N=25, t = -2.074, p=.000), but not those
between post-test and post-post-test (N=25, t = -.717, p=.481). In contrast to this, there is
no significant change within the control group, that is, no difference between pre-test and
later test points (t = -.134, p=.896).
This indicates positive effects of the training. Furthermore, the data suggests that
the training had long-lasting effects. We cannot exclude positive selective effects here,
given that not all participants returned questionnaires for the post-post-test. However, the
even higher means in the post-post-test could be an indicator that more knowledge about
language diversity caused new and more positive experiences in the teachers’ every-day
practice stabilising a more positive attitude. Since changes between later test points failed
to be significant, further investigation on such long-term effects is required.
Unexpectedly, we measured small differences between the test group and the
control group in the pre-test (t = 2.749, p=.007), indicating that our test group showed
slightly more positive attitudes even before the test. This finding might be the result of a
 12

generally more open-minded population willing to take part in an intervention

programme on linguistic diversity.
Group effects
We expected (a) a negative influence of age on attitudes since in sociological studies,
older people often respond more conservatively, and (b) positive effects of higher levels
of language abilities (as reflected in the number of spoken languages and dialects) and
languages as a teaching subject. Since group variables were not independent from each
other (for instance: more female participants were teaching language subjects), we
estimated group effects in a regression analysis. Table 1 shows the main results from a
regression analysis with attitudes in the pre-test as the dependent variable (only variables
close to a significant result are listed).

non standardised standardised

coefficients coefficients
B std.error Beta T significance
(constant) 48.395 4.748 10.192 .000
age -.107 .073 -.149 -1.468 .146
teaching subject: Music/Arts 4.456 2.463 .185 1.809 .074
teaching subject: Sports -4.876 2.693 -.185 -1.810 .074
number of languages spoken 2.220 .879 .256 2.526 .013

Table 1: Results of a regression analysis predicating participants’ attitudes in the pre-test

As the table shows, there were surprisingly few group effects. The age variable shows a
negative Beta, indicating a negative influence on participants’ attitudes, but the result is
not significant. The teaching subjects Art and Music seem to have a small positive
influence, and Sports an equally small negative one, but neither reached significance. The
only variable showing a significant effect, namely a positive one, is the number of
languages and dialects spoken, in accordance with our expectation.
Even more interesting than the specific results of the regression is the fact that so
few variables caused a significant result at all: teachers’ attitudes towards language
diversity seems to be little influenced by personal variables such as gender, age, or
teaching subjects. Especially the fact that language teachers did not show a more positive
attitude is worth mentioning: this means that professionalism in language teaching does
not automatically cause positive effects on linguistic attitudes.
In a second step, we estimated group effects on attitude changes between pre- and
post-test. The only variable causing a significant effect is age, indicating that older
participants tended to change their attitudes less than younger ones. Table 2 provides the
results for this, with attitude change from pre-test to post-test as a dependent variable.
 13

non standardised standardised

coefficients coefficients
B std.error Beta T significance
(constant) 11.711 3.029 3.866 .000
age -.149 .064 -.269 -2.335 .022
Table 2: Results of a regression analysis predicating changes in participants’ attitudes from
pre-test to post-test

As the figures show, the influence of age on attitude changes was even poorer than those
on initial attitudes, and as can be seen in the “Beta” column, the age differences are
comparatively small. These weak group effects on attitude change are an encouraging
result, since they indicate that participants’ benefit from the workshops is more or less
equally distributed.

Differences between thematic domains

In order to find out in which thematic domains the training was most successful, we
looked at possible differences between the domains. Table 3 gives separate means and
standard deviations for attitude change for every domain, sorted by effect size:

Means SD
language repertoire 1.16 2.55
other non-standard language 1.09 1.54
multilingualism .93 2.62
traditional dialects .53 1.37
social strata .33 .88
language change .27 1.48
Table 3: Means and standard deviations for attitude changes

As the table shows, the training had the greatest effects in the domains “language
repertoire”, “other non-standard language”, and “multilingualism”, while the effects in
“traditional dialects”, “social strata”, and “language change” remained comparably small.
These results reflect the focus of the workshops, and are accordingly an indicator for the
success of the treatment.

Effects on different modules

Since our materials are organised into three main modules, D1-D3 (see 3.2 above), we
also teased apart the effects of materials from the different modules. Table 4 shows the
main results of the regression analysis with attitude change as the dependent variable.
 14

non standardised standardised

coefficients coefficients
B std.error Beta T significance
(constant) -1.020 1.827 -.558 .579
D2-Modules 2.108 1.081 .226 1.951 .056
D3-Modules 2.515 .888 .328 2.833 .006
Table 4: Effects of materials from different modules (dependent variable: attitude
change from pre-test to post-test)

The column “Beta” shows the standardised ratio the domains of materials had on attitude
change. Since different workshops employed roughly the same overall amount of
materials, the domains are not independent from each other: the more materials from one
module participants work with, the less they experience from other modules.
The table shows that compared to the effect of materials from module D1, those
from the other modules caused a larger change in participants attitudes, which is in the
order of one quarter (D2) to one third (D3) of a standard deviation (see column ‘Beta’).
Compared to D2, which is only roughly significant, D3 materials seem to cause the
largest and statistically safest effects. This might be due to the fact that D3 materials have
the most direct focus on language and the linguistic system: they tackle negative attitudes
to ‘nonstandard’ language and its speakers by making participants recognise the relevant
grammatical systematicity and complexity, for instance through games and projects
investigating grammatical characteristics of traditional German dialects, of urban
multiethnolects, or of the linguistic differences between spoken and written language.
This focus on language itself can employ a primarily cognitive approach, and it might be
perceived as largely non-threatening for participants, even if it targets opinions and
evaluations of language that have been held dear for quite a while.

5 Conclusions and outlook

This paper discusses effects of a kindergarten and school teacher training programme
targeting negative attitudes towards language outside a perceived monolingual ‘standard’
and its speakers. The programme has the following central characteristics:
- It takes an indirect and inclusive approach in order to effectively tackle potentially
harmful attitudes, adapting and extending methods from antibias programmes to the
linguistic domain;
- it covers a broad range of themes on linguistic diversity, including traditional dialects,
multilingualism, sociolinguistic stratification, and written vs. spoken language;
- it is part of continuing education for teachers, accompanying their ongoing
professional practice;
- it uses authentic language data to make the materials credible for teachers and support
active engagement with the topics.

The goal of the programme is to raise a critical awareness of the underlying social
discrimination and the potentially harmful impact of some linguistic attitudes, and to
 15

change such attitudes in a way that allows teachers to embrace linguistic diversity,
acknowledge students’ linguistic repertoires and resources, and support their linguistic
and academic development and participation accordingly.
Effects of the programme were assessed via measuring attitude changes of
participants in teachers’ workshops employing the materials in Berlin and Brandenburg.
Our results indicate positive attitudinal changes in participants of the workshops, whereas
there were no changes in a control group, and these effects in the test group were not only
evident directly after the training, but also after several months. Our data further suggests
that the programme is effective across personal variables such as teachers’ gender or
teaching subjects, and only weakly associated with age.
Comparisons of different thematic modules showed that materials that target
attitudes towards language structures (module D3) had the largest and statistically safest
effects, followed by those targeting attitudes towards language use (module D2). In
comparison to this, materials that focus on attitudes towards speakers (module D1)
caused a smaller change in attitudes. We interpret this as an effect of the different levels
of attitudes that are targeted in the three modules. D3 and D2 topics might pose a safer
and less threatening domain for participants compared to D1 topics, which might be
emotionally more loaded and challenging. This suggests that it might be helpful to treat
such more demanding topics not in isolation, but – as implemented in the present
programme – in combination with ‘safer’ areas. Experiences from the workshops we
conducted suggest that it is useful to first open participants to attitudinal changes with
such materials that focus on language itself, thus paving the way for difficult and
potentially threatening topics that address prejudices against groups. While previous
research about the development of language awareness has shown that “cognitive
conflict, more than agreement, stimulate[s] restructuring of the learners’ knowledge”
(Svalberg 2007:295), our results indicate that, in the case of linguistic antibias
programmes, this might be easier to accomplish for areas that are less personally
challenging for learners, and thus it might be helpful to start with conflicts that stimulate
restructuring of knowledge on external domains rather than those targeting participants’
self-images.In addition, in view of such differential results, we believe that it is
particularly important for materials on potentially more emotionally loaded themes (as in
module D1 and, to a lesser degree, in D2) to take an indirect, approach to attitudes..
The fact that teachers receive, with each unit, a set of classroom materials to be
implemented into their own teaching might be a key to the enduring change of attitudes
that our results indicate. As pointed out by Gogolin (1994) for multilingual classrooms,
there can be a discrepancy between attitudes that teachers express towards
multilingualism explicitly and their educational practices at school. There is hence a
danger of explicit knowledge on linguistic diversity remaining disconnected from
classroom interaction. In the current programme, classroom materials offer teachers a
straightforward and undemanding way to integrate new perspectives into their teaching.
Employing such materials in their own classroom practice, might give them an
opportunity to interact with their students’ linguistic realities in a more meaningful way,
which might in turn lead them to change their selective perception and develop new
perspectives on their competences. (6) lists feedback that points in this direction, received
from teachers after they had applied the materials in their classrooms:6
 16

(6) “First students thought this unit would criticise their way of speaking. But then they
got aware that the aim of the unit was to explore youth language, and then they paid
full attention.”
“students enthusiastically discovered and described features of spoken language – if
without using correct linguistic terms.”
“Students were amazed and motivated by the fact that even ‘standard German’ is
restricted, and not only their way of speaking. They really enjoyed this unit.”

Against this background, a promising topic for future research is the further investigation
of such classroom applications: how is the change of attitudes after a training programme
like “The many sides of German” reflected in teacher-pupil interaction? What is the
effect on pupils, and what is their experience? In addition, the materials also lend
themselves to the further investigation of teachers’ attitudes towards language variation,
both through field notes capturing participants’ comments during workshops, and through
questionnaires.
Taken together, application and evaluation of the programme has shown that
changing teachers’ attitudes towards linguistic diversity is a challenging, but promising
domain for study and intervention. And it is also, we believe, an important and
worthwhile one in societies where a multilingual and (super-)diverse social and linguistic
reality is at odds with long-standing ideologies of standard language and ‘one nation –
one language’ associations that are slow to change, leading to widespread discrimination
against speakers and linguistic practices outside a monolingual ‘standard’, and the neglect
of large areas of linguistic competence. The educational domain as a key area for the
negotiation of sociolinguistic status, power relations, and social participation, is also a
key area for interventions targeting such linguistic discrimination.

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 21

Acknowledgements

The work presented here was conducted within the Special Research Area SFB 632,
project T1 (‘Modules on Language Variation for Teachers' Education’, PI: H. Wiese),
funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Philip Bracker and Till Woerfel were
involved in earlier phases of the project; application in the actual teachers’ workshops
benefited substantially from the didactic support of Karin Schmidt. It was our good
fortune to have assistance from three exceptionally skilled and dedicated student RAs,
Lydia Gornitzka, Stella Krüger, and Jessica Peter. The project involved two external
partners, namely the Berlin Senate Administration for Education, Science, and Research,
and the Institute “Integration through Education”, and three praxis partners for classroom
applications in Berlin-Kreuzberg: Hector-Peterson Secondary School, Nürtingen Primary
School, and Komşu Kindergarten. Their valuable support is gratefully acknowledged.
Thanks are also due to audiences at ICLaVE 7, Sociolinguistics Symposiums 19 and 20,
GAL 2014 (German Society of Applied Linguistics), USRN 2014 (‘Urban Space
Research Network’), and SLXG 2015 (‘Sociolinguistics of Globalization: (De)centring
and (de)standardization’), where different aspects of the material presented here were
discussed. Finally, our sincere thanks to two anonymous reviewers for thorough and
constructive comments on an earlier version, which substantially helped improve the
paper.

1
For an overview cf., for instance, Wiese (2009), Rampton (2010), Cheshire et al. (2011),
contributions in Quist and Svendsen (eds.) (2010), Kern and Selting (eds.) (2011).
2
Data from KiDKo/E, a corpus of metalinguistic statements in the public debate on
Kiezdeutsch (emails and readers’ comments); accessible via www.kiezdeutschkorpus.de
3
Fieldnotes from workshop; originals in German, our translation.
4
Cf. also Gogolin (1994: Ch.3) on a possible “denied monolingual habitus” or an
orientation at a “multilingual zeitgeist” of teachers in such evaluations.
5
Given that there were 19 statements with possible responses from “1” to “4”, the
numerical range is from 19 as the lowest possible number (= “1” responses to every
statement) to 76 as the highest (= “4” responses to every statement).
6
From written feedback, originals in German; our translation.

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