Practical tip
Learning scenarios to support future-oriented didactics of German as a foreign language

Many students, and hopefully many teachers as well, will call 88/100 a nice result. The international team behind the Erasmus+ project ‘Learning Scenarios to Support Inclusive Language and Culture Teaching for Heterogeneous School Classes’ is particularly proud of the EU jury's assessment of ‘best practice’ for a website with dozens of exciting materials for modern GFL and GSL teaching at primary and secondary schools: https://lernszenarien.eu.
 

By Tom Smits

The partnership between project members and practitioners, consisting of academics, teacher trainers and German teachers (DaF and DaZ), has successfully created a framework for implementing learning scenarios in schools and teacher training. The project partners at universities and schools in Belgium, Italy, Poland and Sweden worked together intensively for three years to realise the work packages and project results.

A broad-based project

The project, which was given the international-sounding short form E-LearnScene, is therefore about much more than just the website. Overall, the project succeeded in achieving five set goals:

1. validating the specific needs of the target groups (pupils, teachers, etc.) in terms of relevant topics and formats for the learning scenarios
2. creating a comprehensive corpus of 50 GFL/GSL learning scenarios for use in primary and secondary schools. For example, on a core topic such as online safety, students are offered a range of tasks (creating an animated film to raise awareness among fellow students, working out the effect of cyberbullying through a flyer, etc.) that allow them to work on (subject-specific) content according to their own interests and thus improve their ability to express themselves in German.
3. scientifically based project-internal evaluation according to the MACS model to ensure the recognition, i.e. implementation and dissemination, of the project results. MACS stands for motivating, activating, coaching and structuring and thus encompasses all aspects of qualitative and effective teaching (Smits et al. 2023).
4. design and implementation of an international teacher training programme.
5. creating an online platform with (instructions for) learning scenarios and an internet forum for users.

Diversity as a positive factor in the learning process

The European evaluators particularly liked the project's overarching goal of promoting and supporting a comprehensive and innovative didactic approach to teaching and learning German as a foreign and second language that makes positive use of the diversity of increasingly multilingual and diverse classrooms, creates synergies with research and collaborative activities, and promotes new technologies as incubators for improvements in language and cultural pedagogy.

Holistic language learning

The research and development project, which ran from 2020 to 2023, was justified by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and the school curricula for foreign languages based on it, which clearly demonstrate the importance of a holistic approach to language learning and teaching. Teachers have to do justice to the complexity of individual learners and therefore the heterogeneity in the classes, and they also have to promote the acquisition of interdisciplinary skills, which has led to an expansion of learning objectives in foreign language teaching beyond linguistic action. Action orientation plays an important role in this. Scenario didactics, which is considered to be a particularly learner-active and action-oriented method, has already been introduced in the area of vocational integration and vocational preparation classes as well as in the area of German as a second language. The wide range of working methods, tools, media, etc. enables all learners to access the core topic in a way that is tailored to their needs.

© Tom F. H. Smits Motivating material

Specifically, about ten didacticians and almost as many German teachers designed, tested and evaluated learning scenarios for German as a foreign and second language in primary and secondary education as part of the EU project. Through in-service training events in the participating countries, scientific and practice-oriented publications and the online resource platform, the project provided and continues to provide primary and secondary school teachers with motivating and target-group-specific teaching materials (at all CEFR levels and for individual lessons and teaching series), offers students in primary and secondary schools activating and differentiating learning opportunities (with or without the use of modern techniques and media), and provides student teachers and teachers in teacher training with step-by-step learning scenarios (with materials and didactic notes).

References

Smits, Tom F.H., Suñer, Ferran & Hageman, Gorik (2023): Das MACS-Modell für Lernszenarien im schulischen DaF- und akademischen Didaktikunterricht. In Demmig, S. et al. (Hgg.), IDT 2022: mit.sprache.teil.haben Band 4: Beiträge zur Methodik und Didaktik Deutsch als Fremd*Zweitsprache, S. 91-96. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.