Building a Learner Community

Description

In Austrian universities, first-year students find themselves in an anonymous course set-up. The lack of a feeling of togetherness this creates is nowhere as apparent as in the university language courses, where, in our case, up to 33 students are supposed to communicate with each other in a foreign language from day one in a classroom where they are lucky to find one or two familiar faces. Creating a learner community is consequently the foremost task in the first few course meetings of our language courses, and it can be facilitated by making students interact ouside the classroom through an ELP. In the following, one such activity is described, a peer-feedback task that helped students in their (autonomous) topic choice for an oral report to be given in class. Its success is examined against some of the prevailing theoretical models of language learner autonomy and socio-cultural theory

Period	01 Apr 2014
Event title	IATEFL LASI PCE
Event type	Conference
Location	United KingdomShow on map