Educational Concept
The Innsbruck Model of Foreign Language Didactics incorporates five living foreign languages - English, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish - into its concept and is characterised by the fact that cross-language, theory- and research-led umbrella courses are accompanied by language-specific, school-related workshops. IMoF thus endeavours to create a network in two ways: On the one hand, cross-language content is brought together and taught to students together, and on the other hand, a network of theory and practice is created between the umbrella courses and the workshops, in which the content is prepared in a language-specific and school practice-related way. This synergy is reinforced by a differentiation in the management of the courses: while the umbrella courses are run by members of the university, the workshops are predominantly taught by teachers from the field. In this way, foreign language teaching at school is given a place in university education and the cooperation between teachers at university and school results in a professionalisation boost for all those involved.
The following principles are modelled both in the university training of teacher trainees and for the later teaching of trainees at school:
- Applications of the principles taught: the inclusion and use of all languages as target languages for specific exercises, work tasks and teaching situations
- Team teaching and team learning: teachers and students work in small multilingual groups
- Promotion of learner autonomy: through the use of the university's internal e-learning platform OLAT (eCampus) and the support of process-orientated writing of individual and group assignments
The IMoF is part of Languages area and is located at Institute for Didactics at Faculty of Teacher Education of the University of Innsbruck.
Origin
IMoF was created as part of the reorganisation of the teacher training curriculum at the University of Innsbruck. The starting point was the experience that the content of the introductory specialised didactics courses, especially in the Romance languages French, Italian and Spanish, was almost identical, but without any cooperation between teachers or students. This fact was particularly evident in the case of students taking two Romance languages. But even for students who combined a Romance foreign language with English, the question arose as to whether it made sense to attend courses with almost identical content twice. Thematic overlaps and the resulting loss of time and resources of monolingual didactics made co-operation appear sensible.
On the initiative of the Institute of Romance Studies, the subject didactics managers of English, Romance and Slavic Studies, in cooperation with external lecturers and Institute for Teacher Education and School Research (ILS), therefore developed a joint foreign language didactics curriculum with the aim of avoiding content overlaps and utilising the synergies gained for a training programme committed to the approaches of multilingual didactics.
When the concept was presented to the relevant study commission, it was extended to include Latin in some areas. The teacher training curriculum came into force in 2001/2002; the first courses based on the new concept took place in the winter semester 2002/2003.
Awards and prizes
- European seal for innovative language projects (2002) (Expert opinion)
- Financial support from the "ARGE Qualitätssicherung in der Lehre" (WS 2002, SS 2004, WS 2004/05, SS 2005)