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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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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The considerable number of learners with a family language other than German poses a big challenge for all of those who are involved. Once again it must be suspected that, at the political level, their integration is regarded as being successfully completed once they have joined the educational system.
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In Germany, future teachers of foreign languages do not only develop their language proficiency, but they also study linguistics, literary studies and foreign language pedagogy (didactics, as it is termed in Germany). Since, at most German universities, all of these are autonomous disciplines, this raises questions of interdisciplinary correspondences, coordination and interrelatedness between all of […]
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In didactics there are many terms (concepts!) that are so established and in long-term use that no one asks anymore what they are actually supposed to designate. Characteristics displaying a kind of pedagogical naturalization can be seen in the unreflected use of these terms in every sort of pedagogical context, as well as in scientific […]
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