Many children only come into contact with the German language in kindergarten. Around half of the children in Vienna grow up with a different mother tongue. Many of them do not have sufficient command of the language later in school either.
The state party chairman of the ÖVP Vienna, Karl Mahrer, sees the reason in the fact that 80 percent of these more than 10,000 children have been in kindergarten, “but the language support in kindergarten is simply completely ineffective”. Therefore, the Viennese ÖVP presented five demands for the promotion of German. Among other things, parents should be made more responsible.
ÖVP criticizes the promotion of German in kindergartens
10,000 pupils in Vienna’s elementary schools hardly speak any German. According to the ÖVP, the reason for this lies in the kindergarten.
The more “speech prompts”, the better
There are more than 2,000 kindergartens in Vienna. 87 of them are operated by the Nikolaus Foundation. There you can see the main problem for language training in the lack of staff. Language promotion happens in relationships with people, adults from the child’s point of view, according to the educational director of the foundation, Susanna Haas, “and the more people I have available in everyday life, the better children can learn language because there are more language opportunities”.
The kindergarten operators also demand a second compulsory year of kindergarten, because if children only went to kindergarten for one year and could not speak German right from the start, “you expect far too much from the kindergarten system or from the child. It is not possible for them to acquire the German language within a year in such a way that they do not need any further support at school,” emphasized Haas.
200 more support staff by 2025
Only three out of five children who need German support actually get it. The city wants to counteract this with more language support staff. The number of support staff is to be increased from 300 in 2020 to 500 in 2025.
“This year alone we have hired 77 new language support staff, have professionalized the language support model in order to prepare all children, regardless of their origin, for school in the best possible way and to teach German as a language,” said Christoph Wiederkehr, City Councilor for Education, from NEOS. He, too, is in kindergarten for a second compulsory year. However, this would have to be ordered by the federal government.