Action research - observe and reflect on your own and others’ teaching
Practical Exploration Projects to consciously investigate your teaching
Video clips from authentic German classrooms all over the world with varying target groups
Develop strategic guidelines for your classroom
Action research
DLL employs action research (i.e. teacher research) to provide the most hands-on continuing education experience. This means that, along with learning about new subject-specific didactic theory, participants are also given the opportunity to investigate, analyze, and participate in real-world instruction, and to try out newly-learned practical strategies themselves. In this way, theory is supplemented with personal experience.
Practical Exploration Projects
As part of every DLL unit, participants conduct an investigation of their own instruction. The so-called Practical Exploration Projects (PEPs) allow teachers to observe and reflect on — and possibly even change — their own teaching.
Teachers benefit from the opportunity to exchange ideas with others in their field, expand their repertoire of teaching strategies, and gain insight into many different classroom situations.
Clips from authentic German classrooms with varying target groups are an important component of DLL. The recordings are not meant to be best-practice models, but rather allow participants to reflect on instruction in real-world contexts.
The recordings are easily accessible, either on the DVDs included with the DLL textbooks, or on your personal mobile devices using a QR-code.
Student-centered instruction means that we take into consideration the diverse backgrounds, interests, talents, and needs of our individual students when planning and teaching. This means, among other things, that many different kinds of materials and strategies are implemented, and that students are given a voice in the learning process to positively influence participation and motivation.
Student engagement is the principle that students who are actively involved with the subject matter are better able to learn. Engaged students participate by asking questions and making conclusions about course work, interacting with others, and discovering for themselves different language structures, patterns, and rules. Students are also encouraged to take leading roles in all aspects of the learning process, from procedural and logistical tasks, to teaching themselves. This keeps students focused and motivated, and helps them become more conscious of their own abilities and learning styles.
An emphasis on interaction means that learning activities offer students many opportunities to engage and cooperate with one another. As one example, students are often encouraged not just to share their own experience or viewpoint on a topic, but to react and build off of the contributions of others. Activities are designed to require interaction, such as in role-plays or conversations in which students report previously unknown information on someone else, come to an agreement, convince someone of something, etc.
Promoting autonomous learning means that we help students become conscious of and reflect on their own learning process. Decisions about instruction and lesson planning should, from the very beginning, be made with the intention of using the languages and experiences students bring with them, and of preparing them to learn other languages in the future.
Communication is always embedded in a culturally-influenced social context, and it is therefore important that students learn the ways in which language is influenced by culture. Students do this by comparing and contrasting German language and culture to their own, and ideally develop their own communicative skills and strategies for orienting themselves to the cultural realities of the German-speaking world.
Task-oriented learning is closely related to active learning, which is the principle that instruction should focus on concepts and topics relevant to the learner (i.e. students learn to communicate about things they experience in their everyday lives). Students should be confronted with real-life situations and problems, which they are able to talk about and solve in the target language. New vocabulary and grammar rules have a role to play, but it is not a central one (such as in isolated grammar exercises or vocabulary drills).
Many students of German have past experiences learning other languages. Teachers should build off these experiences to speed up the learning process, for example by teaching cognates or comparing structures in different languages.
