Minority Children

The pupils themselves have got no language problems among themselves. They can easily communicate because they have a reasonable command of the language level needed for everyday conversations. Many of these children speak Vorarlberg dialect really well and feel at ease in the areas of games, playing, sports, spare time activities and their own interests.

Language problems actually arise because our education is linguistically middle class oriented. All the school books are based on a certain linguistic model presupposing a set of syntactic structures and vocabulary which the children do not get from their peers ; nor can they get this in their homes. This is why the additional classes are necessary.

In these additional classes  this kind of structures are practised through language games. Luckily we have got an expert at our school, Antonia Zechmann, who also trains teachers at the Dornbirn Centre. This of course means that we have got all the learning materials in our school.