Student Conference on Language Awareness and Bilingual Teaching and Learning in Summer Term 2017

Within the framework of the PRONET sub-project "Multilingualism potentials in bilingual subject teaching" of the three didactics for English (Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner), History (Prof. Dr. Christine Pflüger) as well as French and Spanish (Prof. Dr. Bernd Tesch), Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner and Prof. Dr. Bernd Tesch, together with the research assistant Anna Petzoldt, organized two interdisciplinary seminars on bilingual teaching and learning in the summer semester 2017. For these courses, the students had prepared teaching materials that were tested and evaluated in the form of a novel student conference.           

In order to make the overlapping areas of foreign language subject didactics fruitful and visible for the development of a new teaching concept for multilingualism potentials in bilingual subject teaching, this semester the two project seminars "CLIL Texts Tasks: A Language Awareness Approach" and "French and Spanish Bilingual under the magnifying glass - Innovation and Research in Foreign Language Didactics" were organized in an interlocked way. In the form of a student conference with several alternating groups, the prepared teaching materials in English, French and Spanish for secondary levels l and ll were discussed and examined with regard to the concepts of language awareness, multiperspectivity (in the sense of the Human GPS approach) and controversiality. The materials should focus on the so-called "zero hour", as the end of World War II is variously referred to in Europe, and elaborate on the different perceptions of this event in different countries and, if necessary, compare them with the perceptions in Germany. This was to be made clear in particular by means of key linguistic terms from the respective languages in selected sources. The student teachers aimed to provide students with a change of perspective into the respective other culture and other historical perceptions through the language and the sources used, in order to sensitize them to different perceptions and interpretations. In both sessions, the groups were mixed across seminar boundaries and languages, and the teaching materials were each reviewed and evaluated by one or two people from the other group. For this purpose, the students used an evaluation sheet for bilingual teaching in which "curricular validity", "language awareness" or "multi-perspectivity" were important criteria. Finally, the plenary discussed the results and the challenges students faced in processing and evaluating the instructional materials. For example, finding sources appropriate for the age levels required increased effort. In addition, students learned that translations or extensive vocabulary lists can hinder the development of language awareness and multilingualism. This is where text mapping would be helpful. Unlike vocabulary lists, learners should only underline the important vocabulary words they are unfamiliar with and these would then be discussed in class. In addition, the goal of the change in perspective should be made clear in the assignments. (Subject) concepts should become conscious to the students. Another important point is the balance between content and language. Neither one nor the other should predominate, because bilingual teaching is neither pure language teaching nor pure subject teaching. It needs its own curriculum, he said. The students who participated in this new format of the student conference considered it very interesting to learn about and develop new concepts in bilingual education. Due to the participation of fellow students from Romance Studies and English Studies, who each additionally studied different subjects, the interdisciplinary student conference led to a lively exchange. The problem of a lack of access to one or the other language was authentically countered via peer cooperation and peer feedback. Thus, German was used as an overarching lingua franca. &