LANGUAGE AWARENESS IN GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION: AN ANALYSIS OF THE POTENTIAL OF BILINGUAL GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION FOR TEACHING GEOGRAPHY TO LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Abstract

The current migration and refugee flows and increasing linguistic heterogeneity in German
social science classes have changed teaching. It is a change towards language-aware teaching.
The article assesses the question of how bilingual geography teachers’ language perception
could help to develop language-aware geography education. The hypothesis is that bilingual
teachers, due to the simultaneous teaching of content and language, develop and use detailed
language awareness in geography. A model of the language in geography classrooms, which
defines requirements of language actions there, is presented. 16 bilingual geography teachers
in secondary schools in Germany were interviewed over six months to assess their language
awareness by a qualitative analysis referring to the model. The results show that bilingual
geography teachers assume key values related to language-awareness in geographic language.
These results strongly allow discussion of language-aware implications, particularly in terms
of structuring, visualization and transparency of discourse functions.