Sprachliche Diversität in der Schulsozialarbeit: „Die größte Herausforderung“

Abstract

School social workers deal with a highly sociolinguistically diverse target group in a monolingually constructed school environment. On the basis of qualitative interviews analysed by means of content analysis, this article traces how school social workers perceive multilingualism in their field of work. Which communicative practices do they use to enable communication in this linguistically diverse environment? Where do they experience challenges? Multilingualism is understood in terms of the language repertoire and includes not only different languages but also different varieties within a language. The school social workers describe a variety of communicative practices ranging from a careful, empathetic linguistic recipient design to multimodal and multimedia practices. Language barriers due to the lack of a shared language, are perceived as the “greatest challenge” that can only be mitigated but not overcome by interpreting services.