Linguistic diversity is constantly increasing, not only in primary and secondary education but also in nursery schools. Thus one of the key challenges in preschool education is also to support the language skills of children. Besides supporting German as a second language, the question arises of how nursery schools deal with the native tongues of multilingual children.

On behalf of the city of Cologne, the goal of the MehrKita project is to identify which resources educators in nursery schools already have that can be used for multilingual language work in preschool education. To this end, two online questionnaires were designed, to be completed by head teachers and educators at nursery schools. The study focuses on the following questions: How many educators are multilingual? How do they rate their language skills in their native language and in German as their second language? What are the attitudes of educators towards multilingual approaches in early years education?

The survey allows those nursery schools to be identified that show particular potential when it comes to supporting the multilingualism of the children.