Professional training

The DaZ/DaF training at the Institut für Sprache, Bildung und Kultur is aimed at professionals who teach German as a second or foreign language. The programmes below develop that focus for individual fields of work.

DaF/DaZ teachers need spaces in which they can exchange ideas with other teaching staff and get to know and try out new methodology and didactics. This training gives language trainers the opportunity to build knowledge of current developments in the field. The following topics are covered in depth:

• Working with media
• Working with diversity and gender
• Putting theories of methodology and didactics into practice
• Input on developing individual teaching materials
• Intercultural communication with participants
• Intercultural conflict management
• Conflict management with participants from different ethnic backgrounds who carry burdens from their country of origin

German as a second language used to have no fixed place in teacher training. The LABG 2009, which came into force in the 2011/2012 winter semester, brought an overdue change: student teachers now receive an initial — still not sufficient — theoretical grounding in German as a second language during their studies. For some time now, the second phase of teacher training has also paid attention to language-aware teaching.

But teachers who are already working need further well-founded, professional support as well. That is why we offer training in German as a second language for teachers at all types of school. It forms an additional pillar outside the universities, because demand in this field is far from met.

• Fundamentals of DaZ and multilingualism
• Literacy teaching
• Building vocabulary
• Functional grammar
• Writing workshop for pupils
• Taking account of pupils' intercultural everyday worlds
• Language learning and subject learning

As diversity and institutional change through immigration take hold, the tasks of educators and early years staff keep changing. Day-care centres should in future be able to respond to children with German as a second language, so that those children start school successfully. Pre-school didactics should be adapted to their learning needs. The following topics are relevant in this training:

This programme is aimed at pedagogical staff and social workers at schools who support pupils with German as a second language in international classes, orientation classes or small groups.

The training conveys methodological and didactic skills in German as a second language. Participants should be enabled to deliver high-quality support and teaching of German as a second language. The priorities are:

• Theories of second language acquisition
• Language diagnostics
• Drawing up individual language support plans
• Methodology and didactics of German as a second language
• Fundamentals of DaZ
• Learning difficulties of pupils with German as a second language
• Intercultural work with parents
• Communication with parents
• Working with heterogeneity

Subject didactics for several languages: German as a foreign and second language, Turkish, Arabic and Russian.

The subject didactics training engages scientifically with the questions of teaching and learning the subject in question. Which theories allow learning processes to be reconstructed in a didactically meaningful way, and how effectively can learning situations be designed? In language didactics and grammar teaching in particular there are promising new concepts. Teachers need a sound theoretical grounding based on the latest research in order to meet the demands of their practice, of heterogeneous learning groups and of new academic approaches.

Today's pupils speak their first languages at very different levels and rarely reach a written-language level; the textbooks for the languages named are not tailored to their needs. How can teachers nonetheless teach well and take account of the diversity of this group? In the subject didactics training for DaF/DaZ, Turkish, Russian or Arabic, teachers extend and deepen their subject and didactic skills.