Activating and Engaging Learners and Te...

Ask a hundred people what they consider key aspects of good teaching, and you will most likely get quite a variety of responses. But many of us – whether you are a foreign language teacher, university student, teacher educator, researcher, or do not belong to any of these groups – can typically remember a lesson that somehow left a positive impression. As editors of this book, we would like to invite you to think back to a foreign language class that you experienced as enjoyable and purposeful. What was the lesson about and what made it meaningful to you? This volume aims to explore such questions and, in doing so, starts from the premise that stimulating lessons require a readiness on the sides of learners and teachers alike to get involved in the educational process. We thus chose “Activating and Engaging Learners and Teachers” as a leading theme to describe both a prerequisite and a goal of foreign language education. Managing to “get someone on board” arguably depends on individual, social, and systemic factors which are interdependent and influence how teachers design and conduct lessons and how learners experience and profit from them. The contributions in this book investigate these aspects from various angles to illustrate how activation and engagement relate to  

• positive learning environments and relationships,
• texts and teaching materials that facilitate immersive as well as reflective learning experiences,
• approaches allowing for both individualised as well as social learning and engage students cognitively, socially, and emotionally,
• diagnostic measures for assessment and classroom research, and
• current concepts for engaging learners with cultural themes and spaces as well as with political issues.