For quite a while it has been generally acknowledged in foreign language pedagogy that the vast majority of communicative acts is no longer solely verbal; rather, most of our communication and most cultural discourses are characterized by multimodality, using a broad range of semiotic modes, and visual languages in particular. In his book on multimodality […]
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In former times the ideal of language learning was the imitation of the native speaker. However, today’s learners are exposed to a multitude of languages in their own natural social and cultural environment. English has become an almost natural part of everyday communicative life. Not least on the Internet, and for young people in particular, […]
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When it comes to multilingualism, it is not a West African country like Ghana that comes to mind easily. This is no coincidence: Anglophone Africa is not really a focus of English studies and certainly not of English language pedagogy. While postcolonial literary and cultural studies have dealt intensively with the great representatives of Anglophone […]
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The starting point of my thoughts are observations made in teacher education at the university level in Berlin (English) as well as data published in 2018 by the Statistics Office of the region and the local Ministry of Education. On the one hand, the body of student teachers is getting more varied; on the other […]
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At the dawn of the third millennium, a collective of educational scholars called ‘The New London Group’ published the manifesto “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” laying the foundation for a new approach to language teaching: instead of teaching a single literacy of reading and writing, they argued for teaching multiple literacies to enable their students to […]
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Linguists distinguish between a formal approach to the language system and the communicative language use in culturally embedded situations (langue vs. parole with de Saussure 1916). As a consequence, the basic unit of language description and analysis is different. Whereas structural-generative linguistics takes the sentence as the central category, functional linguistics sees the genre (ie. […]
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This year’s Congress of Education in Muenster entitled “Promoting Talent, Developing Performance, Enhancing Educational Justice” impressed by its size alone. Long before the congress (19th to 22nd September 2018) it was fully booked with over 1,000 registrations, an expression of great enthusiasm in schools and among teachers. The keynotes always took place in the large […]
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Digitalisation is everywhere. It has become a political and economic buzz word, and it has moved to the top of the education policy agenda, at least rhetorically. Of course, foreign language pedagogy has been dealing with it for some time now. Two observations may lead to the following diagnoses. Hardware Questions On the one hand, […]
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