Cultures Archives - Hallet's Language Learning Log

Digitality: culture and foreign language education

Now – at last – the digitization of teaching and schools is no longer just a matter of policy statements and announcements. The pandemic has forced us to digitize everyday teaching. Now – finally – we are talking very concretely and practically about end devices, video tools and learning platforms, but finally also about their […]

Fact checking is currently booming. This has less to do with a growing general interest in truth, on the contrary. Fact checking is an urgently needed corrective against the spread of lies, false truths and conspiracy theories. Questions about the reliability of news or information are a direct result of the all the opportunities for […]

One of the most important abilities that school has to teach young people is the ability to orient and position themselves in new or different cultural environments. This applies to each individual social environment in one’s own life world as well as to other and foreign-language societies. This usually happens rather intuitively: One uses one’s […]

Recently I disposed of a Windows 95 PC, with 95 for 1995, an operating system that overcame the surface of DOS commands in the mid-1990s and visualized the complete usage. This is worth mentioning because the popularization of personal computers and the Internet use now goes back more than thirty years without any appropriate educational-political […]

16. March 2020
Cultures, Language Learning and Communication, School and Education
Wolfgang Hallet
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In the Federal Republic of Germany, the principal educational goals have always included the values of human dignity, equality and self-determination as layed down in the Constitution. In particular, the ban on discrimination based on origin, religion, gender or political convictions applies. Cultural communication as a general goal This also describes the key objectives of […]

16. March 2020
Cultures, Language Learning and Communication, School and Education
Wolfgang Hallet
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If we want to counter forms of racism, exclusion and discrimination in the foreign language classroom, the mere commitment to noble guiding principles does not suffice. What is to be done? Of course, it is essential that all foreign language teachers, in their individual attitudes, actually feel committed to the goals of preserving human dignity, […]

16. March 2020
Cultures, Literature and Film, School and Education
Wolfgang Hallet
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It is a sad truth that the world is full of stories and testimonies of Holocaust experiences. Many of them, like Judith Kerr’s novels, are survivor stories that bear witness to the possibility of standing up for the victims, of protecting those who were persecuted and of giving children a new family. The didactic finding, […]

21. May 2019
Cultures, Language Learning and Communication, School and Education
Wolfgang Hallet
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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 […]