Course info

Because of various phenomena such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities or increasing migration, heterogeneity is a common phenomenon at all levels of society and inclusion is a vital educational concern. This is also true for the EFL classroom where teachers need to be equipped for educating pupils with heterogeneous characteristics, predispositions and goals. EFL teachers’ responsibility for meeting learners’ individual needs is not a new idea. It has always been assumed that heterogeneous learning environments prove to be conducive to children’s success in learning a foreign language. However, inclusive EFL education in Germany still is an innovative concept due to several factors, like EFL teachers not feeling well enough prepared and a lack of empirically proven quality criteria for good inclusive EFL teaching. There might be concepts for good EFL teaching, but it is still unclear which approaches really work for children with very different needs in inclusive EFL settings. This course has a closer look at the opportunities and challenges of EFL teaching in the heterogeneous classroom. Therefore we will deal with the terms ‘Heterogeneity’ and ‘Inclusion’ first. A special focus will then be on inclusive EFL education in the broadest sense by discussing different forms of heterogeneity an EFL teacher will come across. Current on-going research on inclusive EFL teaching will also be studied.