Page 452 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

430 Janet Spreckels and Helga Kotthoff

professional worlds in Germany. Keim shows the children’s ability to cope with
often contrasting traditions and demands from different social worlds as funda-
mental in the process of forming their own socio-cultural identity.
Ghetto children who, at the age of ten, have the chance to go to the Gym-
nasium or the Realschule (only 10–20% of an age-group attend these prestige
schools) develop quite different social orientations. Since both types of schools
are situated outside the ghetto, the children have to enter German educational
worlds where migrants are a small minority. They experience the negative
image of the Turkish migrants in terms of abuse such as scheiß Ausländer
(‘damn foreigner’) and dreckiger (‘filthy’) or dummer Türke (‘stupid Turk’). In
these schools they have to cope with new educational, linguistic, and social
standards for which they are usually not prepared. A typical reaction to these ex-
periences is the organization of an ethnically-defined peer group, along with
dissociation from or the upgrading of ethnic features.
Keim observed the stylistic development of the ‘power-girls’ in two pro-
cesses of differentiation: the girls’ emancipation from the traditional Turkish fe-
male role and their opposition to the German school world. The ‘power-girls’
created a specific style that contrasted on all stylistic dimensions with the Tur-
kish style of their parents and of the ‘traditional young Turkish woman’, as well
as with that of the German Gymnasium. Both contrasts made the girls fall back
on features taken from the behavior of young Turkish males in their surround-
ings in their early phase. They used many vulgar expletives, a German-Turkish
language mixture, and pidginized morphosyntax, for example.
The ‘power-girl’ style was rigorously rejected by German educational insti-
tutions. These experiences led them to transform their style in order to become
socially and professionally successful in German society. Stylistic elements that
had been evaluated by the peer-group as ‘not belonging to us’ were accepted in
later biographical phases when the processing of new experiences effected a
change in social orientations and aspirations.
In the case of the ‘power-girls’, a mixing of German and Turkish was pre-
ferred in in-group communication, especially in everyday interactions, such
as in narration and argumentation. In mixing, the girls use their bilingual com-
petence for discursive and socio-symbolic functions, as Keim shows. Turks of
the parental generation, as well as Germans (the girls’ teachers and German
peers), were excluded from mixing. Since Keim could not find another group
that had developed such a highly elaborate mixing style, she assumes that
mixing, as well as its discursive functions, are part of the ‘power-girls’’ peer-
group style.
Those ‘power-girls’ who had to leave the ghetto early in the course of their
educational careers had – when Keim met them – already acquired a high level
of competence in mono-lingual German. But in in-group communication, mix-
ing was their preferred code of interaction. The mixing of these girls differed