How important is language acquisition to the integration of skilled immigrants? This is the subject of “Deutsch lernen für ein Leben in Deutschland” (Learning German for a Life in Germany), a report on the latest research findings. The bottom line: Early and well-tailored language-learning programmes are a must for a modern host country.
(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.
Changing conditions also create new opportunities – especially in socially distanced teaching. Teachers are spoilt for choice in this regard: here are some tips on how to choose from among the multitude of existing methods, techniques and approaches the ones best suited to interactive learning for your learners.
Who learns German and why? And what can governments, institutions and teachers do to ensure that languages are accorded equal importance? We asked Hans-Jürgen Krumm, a professor of German studies and author of a recently published book entitled “Sprachenpolitik Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache”(Language Politics in German Teaching).
Teachers working with literacy courses need special skills and methodical approaches in order to teach these learners successfully.
Will a student’s ability to learn German be negatively affected if their German teacher has a foreign accent? How should this issue be dealt with by employers and institutions, and indeed by the teachers themselves?
German lessons in the local park? A class excursion to a department store or shopping centre? A visit to a library, museum or zoo? A look inside the German embassy, or simply a stroll through the city? Your learners will be grateful, as new learning environments provide a change of scene, arouse interest and curiosity and increase motivation.
Language mediation is the sixth competence defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Why has it become more important and how can it be incorporated into lessons?
Cognitive linguistics and grammar have been developing for three decades and promise to offer great benefits to language teaching. It is no exaggeration to describe this process as a paradigm shift – moving away from a focus on form and structure and towards prioritizing the constructions in learners’ brains.
How can teachers take advantage of multilingual potential in their classes? And how can trainee teachers best be prepared for linguistic diversity in the classroom? Theorists and practitioners in Germany and Europe are looking into these questions.
Why do we often already know what our interlocutor wants to say before he has finished his sentence? How is it that we understand many terms even when we hear them for the first time? And what importance does this have for learning and translating foreign languages?
When learning a specialist subject it is necessary to use specific language skills, alongside the specialist language content. However, children from educationally deprived backgrounds or those with German as a second language often have difficulties. Scaffolding is a good technique to make specialist subjects more linguistically accessible.
