About PhyDiv

Welcome to the PHYDIV project! There is growing linguistic diversity among Germany’s school pupils. Alongside German, many languages are spoken by students whose families have immigrated to Germany. In these families’ everyday lives, their native language often plays a role as significant as German. Thus, there is a broad spectrum of language experience in Germany’s schools, from monolingualism in a language other than German (among children who have just immigrated) to advanced reading and writing skills in German and other languages.

This fact is the starting point for the research project Physikunterricht im Kontext sprachlicher Diversität (PHYDIV—Physics lessons in the context of linguistic diversity). The goal of the PHYDIV project is to develop and review lesson plans that take the learning group’s linguistic composition into account in order to improve learning outcomes in the subject. The study will be conducted in physics classes. Researchers will ask whether and under what conditions school pupils learn more or better if they receive systematic support in using their entire linguistic repertoire to grasp the material. Bilingual and multilingual pupils will be using their native languages in the classroom. The study should yield not only basic findings but also results that can be used to design successful physics lessons for multilingual classrooms.

PHYDIV is a cooperation project between the Universität Hamburg-based subject groups Physics Education and Intercultural and International Comparative Education.

The project is being funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The study begins in the summer of 2021.