What happens when the languages children already speak are left out of school? And what opportunities are we missing as a result? The Erasmus+ project Your Language Counts! brought together partners from five countries to develop new approaches to Heritage Language Education (HLE).
Opening in Mannheim in 2028, the Forum Deutsche Sprache will be part language museum, part science centre – a place where visitors can discover, explore and actively engage with the German language. Prof. Dr Henning Lobin, scientific director of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) and the main force behind the project, explains what makes the Forum so significant and previews the fascinating programme ahead.
The Kompendium DaF/DaZ series has come out with a guide to “Multilingual Learning in Social and Institutional Contexts”. This new publication delves into various aspects of the debate over multilingual education – and recapitulates them clearly for both prospective and experienced GFL and GSL teachers.
Learners of German as a foreign language often have a wide range of prior language skills: their native language, English or other foreign languages they’ve learnt at school, or expressions they’ve picked up whilst travelling or at work. A multilingual approach can take advantage of these various language skills to help German learners.
Since 2020 the Goethe-Institut USA has been expanding its nationwide network to boost German teaching by working together with American schools. “SPARK for German” is a joint project of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) and the Goethe-Institut. The acronym stands for “Strukturiertes Programm zum Aufbau von Ressourcen und Kompetenzen” or “Structured Programme for the Development of Resources and Skills”.
Learners with self-regulation skills learn more efficiently – at school and later in life, too. But is that possible with fewer teachers?
(Foreign) languages open up new worlds to us, but we generally feel most at home in our mother tongue. And yet, as Professor Thorsten Piske at Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen and Nuremburg explains in an interview, our native language isn’t always the language we speak best.
Prof Dr. Torben Schmidt is an important voice in the field of digital foreign language learning. In an interview with Dr. Moritz Dittmeyer, he discusses the potential and the challenges of AI technologies in foreign language learning.
Many providers of AI writing assistants promise “high-quality writing at the push of a button”. Proofreading and editing software is now capable of instantly correcting reams of text and providing suggested improvements. But how good are these AI editors, and do they help foreign language learners learn to write well themselves?
AI technology is now omnipresent and it’s hard to imagine teaching a foreign language these days without it. Here’s a look at the emerging field of natural language processing and potential uses (and abuses) of AI tools in language courses.
The World Wide Web seems to be the new classroom of the digital age. But physical real-life spaces still serve an important function even in online German classes. Here are some thoughts on the concept of deterritorialization and its significance in foreign language teaching.
Motivation and participation are key factors in learning. So online instruction requires some special methods to achieve learning success and progress. And feedback is one such essential method. We tested various methods of peer-to-peer feedback in an interventional study in Colombia.
