Teaching materials mediating a teacher-researcher collaboration on a multilingual writing pedagogy

Abstract

Even though teachers of the language of schooling (LoS) and of foreign languages (FL) teach writing in their respective language classrooms, few cross-curricular connections are made in their teaching practices. The present research project attends to this gap, aiming at (1) gaining a deeper understanding of how teachers of different languages teach writing, and (2) exploring the extent to which the same teachers may align their writing pedagogies through collaboration with each other and a researcher. The project took place in German (LoS), English, French and Spanish (FLs) classes at secondary schools in Berlin, Germany. Theoretically, the project uses the Discourses of Writing (Ivanič, 2004) to describe and align current writing pedagogies. Methodologically, it builds on nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) and combines ethnography with design research: after ten weeks of ethnographic observations in all language classrooms, the project culminated in the collaborative design of new teaching materials that mediated a multilingual teaching approach to writing in German and Spanish classes.

This presentation will focus on the collaborative process of designing teaching materials that involved a German and a Spanish teacher as well as me as a researcher. Ethnographic observations had revealed that the teachers had divergent teaching approaches to writing: the German teacher foregrounded the Genre Discourse in their practices while the Spanish teacher foregrounded the Skills Discourse. Both teachers lamented that students lack awareness of the communicative purpose of writing tasks. Based on these observations, I created an initial design for multilingual teaching materials to afford their use in both language classrooms and to promote the Social Practice Discourse of Writing. Through engaging teachers in discussions on the communicative purpose of writing tasks, these materials were then collaboratively adapted to the upcoming lessons. In the presentation, I will discuss to what extent teachers’ perspectives on writing converged (or not) in their teaching practices with the new materials.