The Effects of Multilinguality on the Development of Causal Speech Acts in the Geography Classroom

Abstract

This explorative, qualitative study examines the use and effectiveness of resources of multilinguality, with particular regard to the development of causal links in geography classes. Contentual and linguistic strategies of multilingual pupils in creating causal links were collected and evaluated systematically. This was done by means of a qualitative content analysis of oral, cooperative lesson sequences. A model on how to deal with multilingual, systemic learning settings is presented as a resulting hypothesis.

Keywords

• resources of multilinguality
• causal speech acts
• systemic thinking
• qualitative content analysis