The aim of this course is to individualise university students’ learning and make sure that “teaching” is tailored to your needs. It will allow you to deeply immerse yourselves into areas of language learning you consider highly relevant and do this in your own time and pace.
Thus, the way this course is organised is somewhat different from a regular seminar and similar to directed or self-study classes, which are common in quite a few anglophone countries: There will be a prep session (at the beginning of the semester) and one final “conference“ (one Saturday towards the end of the semester). In the meantime, you will have the opportunity to pursue a topic of your own interest within the topic area of this seminar (i.e. issues revolving around learners‘ motivation/interest/emotions/self-concept/intelligence/language aptitude, error correction…). You will receive guidance and support as needed from your fellow students and your lecturer to complete the following three assignments: First, each student (or team) is supposed to do research on their chosen topic and then write a concise paper on it*. Second, each student (or team) is supposed to write a short review on somebody else’s paper. At the end, each student (or team) is going to do a very short presentation on their findings in our final “conference”, where we are going to discuss all of the issues you raised and evaluate what this means for language learning and teaching.
*Every paper will be part of our collection of seminar papers; they will be handed to each participant at the end of the course. |
