Student conference on language awareness and bilingual teaching and learning in summer semester 2017

As part of the PRONET sub-project "Multilingualism potentials in bilingual subject teaching" of the three didactics departments for English (Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner), History (Prof. Dr. Christine Pflüger) and French and Spanish (Prof. Dr. Bernd Tesch), Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner and Prof. Dr. Bernd Tesch, together with research assistant Anna Petzoldt, organized two interdisciplinary seminars on bilingual teaching and learning in the summer semester of 2017. The students had prepared teaching materials for these courses, which were tested and evaluated in the form of a new type of 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 potential in bilingual subject teaching, the two project seminars "CLIL Texts Tasks: A Language Awareness Approach" and "French and Spanish bilingually under the magnifying glass - innovation and research in foreign language didactics" were organized in an interlinked manner this semester. 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 controversy. The materials should focus on the so-called "zero hour", as the end of the Second World War is variously referred to in Europe, and work out the different perceptions of this event in different countries and, if necessary, compare them with the perception in Germany. This should be made particularly clear using key linguistic terms from the respective languages in selected sources. The aim of the student teachers was to enable pupils to change their perspective on the 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 respective other group. The students used an evaluation form for bilingual teaching in which "curricular validity", "language awareness" and "multi-perspectivity" were important criteria. Finally, there was a plenary discussion about the results and the challenges that the students faced when processing and evaluating the teaching materials. For example, it required an increased effort to find appropriate sources for the age groups. In addition, the students learned that translations or extensive vocabulary lists can hinder the development of language awareness and multilingualism. Text mapping would be helpful here. In contrast to vocabulary lists, learners should only underline the important vocabulary they are unfamiliar with and these would then be discussed in class. In addition, the aim of the change of perspective should already be made clear in the tasks. Pupils should become aware of (specialist) concepts. Another important point is the balance between content and language. Neither one nor the other should predominate, as bilingual teaching is neither pure language teaching nor pure subject teaching. It needs its own curriculum. The students who took part in this new format of the student conference found it very interesting to learn about and develop new concepts in bilingual teaching. The participation of fellow students from Romance Studies and English Studies, who were also studying different subjects, led to a lively exchange at the interdisciplinary student conference. The problem of a lack of access to one or the other language was authentically addressed through peer cooperation and peer feedback. German was used as the overarching lingua franca. &