An Investigation Into the Turkish/German Bilingual Education Projects Within the Early Childhood Education System in Germany
Abstract
Germany is a country that has the capacity of those institutions, which can educate
90.7% of the children between three and six years old. The regulations of early childhood
education were made by German Education Council in 1971.They can be listed as
follows; the provision of the general and compensatory supports, the condition of the
individual and social learning facilities for children prior to primary school, the inclusion
of the kindergarten in the general education system and the use of current research results
in the preparation of the early childhood education programs. The real goal of the early
childhood education institutions in Germany is that they help children to become
responsible citizens in the society. According to the statistics were obtained at the end of
1998, there were 7 320 000 emigrants in Germany. This number corresponds to 9% of the
German population, which is 85 million in average. When the emigrants’ origin countries
are investigated, Turks are the first in order 28.8%; then Yugoslavians, Italians, Greeks,
and Austrians are 9.8%, 8.4%, 5.0%, and 2.5% respectively.
The project of selecting Turkish as a first elective language course after sixth
class had been started and dismissed prior to the Bilingual Education Project. Until
recently, the Turkish/German bilingual schools numbered 36. However, according to the
current statistics, it has fallen down to 9. Considering the percentage of the Turkish
population in Germany, this number is relatively provocative. Families prefers the
bilingual education project; the most important reasons for this are; being one of the
parents of a child either German or Turkish and being ambitious of German families about
their children’s well communication with Turkish game friends as a result of the increase
in numbers of the Turkish minority. In this paper, current situation of bilingual early
childhood education institutions in Berlin will be described and some of those institutions
will be analyzed in details.
In short, learning German and Turkish concurrently is extremely important for
the Turkish children. Since they live in this society, they should learn German, express
their own ideas and understand what has been going around them simultaneously. They
also should learn Turkish so as to maintain their parent’s mother tongue, understand and
transfer of the experiences, feelings, relations and values of the society and the origin,
which they come from and are belong to. If their mother tongue is rejected at the nursery,
they will feel that their origin and families are discarded. Therefore the emotionally
aggravated child either he/she refuses his/her family or he/she becomes introverted and
will not want to learn anything. German children will have friends, whose mother tongues
are not German, in the neighbourhood. Consequently, they will taste the success of
understanding their friends’ language even slightly at both cultural relations. Thus
children, as of their early childhood, notice the existence of various humans and languages in the world.
Key words : Bilingual, education, pre-school education, German education
system.
Keywords
Details
Primary Language
tr;
Subjects
-
Journal Section
-
Authors
Ebru Aktan Kerem
This is me
Publication Date
October 10, 2013
Submission Date
October 10, 2013
Acceptance Date
-
Published in Issue
Year 2004 Volume: 20 Number: 20