The Importance of Reflexivity in Bilingual Teaching

Abstract

Reflexivity has been introduced as a scientific habitus by the famous French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This habitus is also extremely important for didactics: Teachers reflect on their acting in the classroom, on their own personality and last but not least on their concern in the field of education. This approach helps teachers to optimize their teaching. It is especially important for the practice of immersion-teaching, as it enables bilingual teachers to become researchers in the field of learning of subject-contents as well as in the field of language-acquisition. Basing her discussion on the theory of Karl Bühler, the author demonstrates some different approaches to this sort of applied research. Moreover, she indicates the political and cultural impacts of language-decision in immersion-teaching, especially pointing out the dangerous under-estimation of traditional European languages when focussing on English-Immersion.