English language teaching: Processes in language acquisition and communication skills

This Module addresses the following issues: How is language learnt? How does language develop? What are communicative skills? How do communication and language acquisition connect? How are language acquisition and communication skills best described? What is the teacher’s role as a language guide? How does the teacher plan lessons that facilitate language acquisition? What is the connection between methodology, theory of learning, language approach and actual teaching?

The point of departure is language skills areas, discourse competence, strategic competence and learning. The focus will be on “processes” as a dynamic hub of language and language development, e.g. hypothesis formation, reading strategies, communication strategies.

The following issues will be central:

• The skills: listening, reading, writing, speaking to, and communicating with others, seen in the light of communicative competences, including the use of strategies in communication and learning.
• Interlanguage development seen in relation to pupils’ preconditions and potential for learning, learning strategies and individual roads to language acquisition and learning.
• Setting objectives, practical planning of varied ways of working, IT, teaching materials, assessing and giving feedback on interlanguage – with a view to differentiation and inclusion.
• Paradigmatic shifts in language teaching and the connection between methodology, the philosophy of learning and educational planning based on current national and international regulations.

The student’s own language development will currently be considered in relation to the target areas of the Module.

The knowledge base of the Module National and international research on language acquisition and communication, the skills: reading, writing, listening, speaking to, and communicating with, others; language teaching and the academic subject “English” in the Danish primary and lower secondary school, including national and international regulations and guide-lines about the subject. Competence areas included in the Module ‘Language acquisition and foreign language communication’.

The Module will also lean on selected knowledge and skills objectives from ‘Linguistic competence and language teaching’ as well as ’Teaching English as a foreign language’. Competence aims included in the Module The student can work out well-researched plans, carry out, assess and develop differentiated teaching based on pupils’ preconditions and potential for learning, including pupils’ use of learning and communication strategies and processes.