Jeanine Steinbock
Teaching English 2.0: Status quo and conceptualization of digital English lessons
Jeanine Steinbock (JMU Würzburg)
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann
Initial situation - opportunities and possibilities
Teachers today face a variety of new tasks. In times of increasingly sophisticated teaching methods, many teachers are confronted with a seemingly unsolvable task: How to design attractive lessons, provide comprehensive teaching materials, and keep track of the timeframe of the school year? One answer to this question can be digital media. Working with apps and web tools provides teachers with a range of opportunities to make their lessons both effective and motivating. New media represent a significant part of the reality of life for learners and must therefore play a major role in the school context.
Objectives - inventory and development
This dissertation is intended to evaluate, given the variety of web tools and education apps that are available today, what teachers need for their English lessons and to (further) develop them based on an empirical survey. To meet this requirement as precisely as possible, it is important that a large-scale empirical study is carried out, and accordingly, the actual status quo at Bavarian grammar schools is determined. This project is also conceivable as a collaboration between school pedagogy, school psychology, and other specialist disciplines, and is therefore integrated into a cooperation project of the ‘Professional School of Education’ at the University of Würzburg. Through the resulting synergies and the exchange with these areas of research, a large project on ‘Teaching 2.0’ can be realized.
The empirical study should provide answers to how future teacher training can be used to take advantage of the didactic value of education apps and web tools. The interlinking of the first and second training phases of teacher training is to be optimized in ‘Teaching 2.0’. With the help of an empirical study at grammar schools in Bavaria, both sides will have their say. Teachers who already use web tools and education apps in the classroom should be asked about their experiences and suggestions for improvement. Teachers who have not yet found access to this modern form of teaching should be asked for reasons. The results should offer an extensive inventory and further development approaches of digital English lessons.
