Given that every third child grows up with a recent migrant background (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2017), teachers are facing increasingly multilingual and diverse classrooms, often with little practice and little theoretical background knowledge. Aiming to prepare teaching students for the increasingly diverse classroom and seeing the need for the inclusion of practical and theoretical elements in teacher education, the joint project language education connects teacher education in the context of German as a second language with the language education of newly arrived migrant students.

The main goals are:

• A teacher education that allows the teaching students to apply theory to practice
• Supporting schools in the language education of their students
• Empirical research in a multilingual context and in the context of German as a second language

The joint project language education consists of four individual projects which react to the different challenges that teachers face when working with students with German as a second language. Depending on the language competence and the year group of the students, the projects have differing methodical and didactic focuses.
The teaching students are qualified in Bachelor and Master seminars prior and/or parallel to the teaching interventions. As well as getting an insight into the acquisition of German as a second and foreign language, special needs treatment and lesson planning, the teaching students are made more sensitive to intercultural differences.