Abstract
Schools have begun to face many challenges with the influx of recently immigrated students who are not able to speak the official language well enough to participate in class. To help integrate and accelerate language acquisition in German schools, these students are often enrolled in "international classes". Our project, "Biology for Everyone", teaches newly arrived secondary students science through the use of hands-on experiments. While addressing scientific content, students build new language structures and improve their German. Using 13 interviews, the concomitant research examines students’ evaluations of the project in relation to science as well as language acquisition with a qualitative content analysis. Results show that students value this action-oriented approach as it helps them understand scientific concepts. Furthermore, they notice an improvement in their German and an increase in their science content knowledge. Therefore, such "international classes" should be considered for use in additional subjects in order to ease integration into the regular school system.
Highlights
As the number of immigrated students enrolled in the German school system has increased in recent years, the educational sector faces many challenges. 745,545 asylum requests have been brought forward in the last year alone, with children between 6 and 18 years making up 20.6%, a number higher than ever before. [22] 15(1), 2019Hands-on science for recently immigrated studentsDepending on the federal state and school, these newly arrived students begin their education in different ways
The first deals with the first research question, investigating how the science lesson may be perceived as a chance to improve German language acquisition
The second focuses on how the students evaluate the project “Biology for Everyone” and extent to which it might be conducive for motivation
Summary
As the number of immigrated students enrolled in the German school system has increased in recent years, the educational sector faces many challenges (cf Meisterfeld, 2016). When speaking of an integration time period, schools can implement a continuous integration which starts at lower level subjects such as art and P.E., and transitions to a full-time integration in all subjects when a steady level of German is achieved. Another method is to initially separate the students to study full-time in distinct “international classes” before an entire transfer to regular classes takes place. In terms of subject range, these classes can solely offer German or they may present a large variety of subjects (cf. Ahrenholz et al, 2016)
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