BELIEFS OF SLOVENIAN TEACHERS OF GERMAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE ABOUT MULTILINGUALISM

This study investigates Slovenian GFL teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism and the use of multilingual approaches in GFL teaching. There are three prerequisites for promoting multilingualism in Slovenian: GFL curricula, GFL textbooks, and GFL teachers. Teachers' attitudes and experiences play the key role in deciding how GFL teaching works in practice and which principles are actually implemented. The results of the data analysis, obtained through interviews with ten GFL teachers in Slovenia, show that GFL teachers are generally positive about multilingualism. Elements of multilingualism do occur in DaF lessons, but mostly only as contrastive comparisons with Slovenian and English, mainly in the areas of grammar and vocabulary. Other languages or learners' own language resources are usually not discussed. According to the teachers, there is not enough time for in-depth discussion of this topic and, above all, too little teacher training to enable teachers to promote multilingualism in the foreign language classroom. The study shows that there is still much room for successful implementation of multilingualism in Slovenian GFL lessons. Keywords: multilingualism; L3-didactics; teachers; German as a foreign language; teachers’ beliefs