Educational curricula in many German federal states require educators of all school subjects and grades to support their students’ academic language development. In order to fulfil this challenging task, teachers must not only understand the needs of a linguistically diverse student body, but also acquire the pedagogical language knowledge necessary to provide linguistically responsive instruction. The university plays an important role in the education of future teachers and should therefore provide learning opportunities that offer the chance to gain basic linguistic knowledge and to develop positive attitudes towards inclusive language education. However, dealing with linguistic diversity in the classroom is not yet a compulsory topic for pre-service teachers in all federal states.
Based on an online-survey among 121 pre-service teachers, we aimed to obtain infor-
mation about the level of preparedness of pre-service teachers to deal with linguistic diversity in subject teaching. At a university without compulsory courses on the topic, we investigated the participants’ beliefs about linguistic diversity in the classroom, their familiarity with academic language features, and the learning opportunities they had benefited from during their studies.