This article examines the notion of the native speaker. Despite a substantial body of critical literature on the native speaker construct that has emerged in the past few decades, the term continues to be widely used in the world of language education and beyond, as is evident in, e.g., job advertisements or promotional materials for language courses and teacher train-ing offerings. This observation highlights the ambiguous status of the native speaker con-struct: on the one hand it has been criticized based on its theoretical shortcomings that ren-der the construct at best inadequate; on the other, the ongoing popularity of the native speaker within and beyond the domain of language education continues to proliferate and reinforce an ideology of native speakerism (Holliday 2006). The article provides an over-view of these critiques and discusses their relevance to and impact on current practices and policies in language education, taking the Companion Volume to the Common European Framework of Reference (Council of Europe 2020) as an example. The longevity of an ill-defined concept such as the native speaker is subsequently explored considering its relation to and origins in colonial thinking. The article concludes that the construct of the native speaker should be of primary concern in critical pedagogies that seek to decolonize lan-guage education.
Aufsätze
This article focuses on EU-funding for social sciences and humanities (SSH), paying par-ticular attention to projects in foreign language learning and in the philologies. A survey of funding programmes for research and innovations, past and present, will show that SSH-oriented calls have played an increasing role in the financial frameworks, especially so in so-called bottom-up (or individual) funding lines. Still, it is a long way for SSH, and even more so for foreign language research, to be better integrated in the large-scale, usually collaborative top-down research clusters with their socio-political direction. However, the past has shown that it is possible to take influence on the programme descriptions as well as the specific calls, even before they are ratified or published, respectively. The article ends with four suggestions how to achieve a greater awareness for foreign language studies and the philologies in the responsible boards and bodies.
Information and scientific knowledge form the basis of modern knowledge and media so-cieties. They shape the actions of individuals as well as the decisions of (educational) po-litical institutions – on the condition that the respective contents are relevant to society. Foreign language didactics as a scientific subject of teaching and learning foreign and sec-ond languages is socially relevant – after all, mastering languages is a key competence in today's globalized and culturally diverse world. But are their discipline-specific contents sufficiently communicated and, if so, how? The type of communication and also the com-municated content change depending on the addressees. In addition, different communica-tion platforms and media require a variety of forms of expression and practices.
In der ersten Welle der Covid-19-Pandemie wurde der herkunftssprachliche Unterricht (HSU) in Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW), einem der fortschrittlichsten Bundesländer in Be-zug auf die HSU-Didaktik, auf Fernunterricht umgestellt. Technologievermittelter Unter-richt wurde von vielen Lehrkräften als unmittelbare und scheinbar naheliegende Reaktion angesehen. Der Einsatz digitaler Ressourcen zur Unterstützung des Fernunterrichts könnte aber auch eine langfristige Lösung für den heterogen zusammengesetzten und logistisch schwierigen HSU darstellen. Mit Hilfe einer Online-Querschnittsbefragung und einer qua-litativen Datenanalyse wurde untersucht, wie der Fernunterricht in der Praxis umgesetzt wurde und welche didaktischen Anpassungen anschließend vorgenommen wurden. Die Er-gebnisse belegen ein deutliches Missverhältnis zwischen einer Minderheit von Lehrkräften, die von den Potenzialen digitaler Medien profitieren konnten, und einer großen Mehrheit, die nicht in der Lage war, die gewohnten interaktiven Ziele zu verfolgen. Strukturelle in-stitutionelle Isolation und fehlende Netzwerke trugen zu einem weitgehend negativen di-daktischen Einfluss auf den Unterricht bei.