Talking about America: Image or Reality? Researching on Learning Strategies

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2, University of Kassel (Institut für Sprachwissenschaften - Fremdsprachenlehr- und -lernforschung), course: The Mental Lexicon: Vocabulary & Grammar Issues, language: English, abstract: To give a short overview on this term paper we want to explain our project and the aims of this research paper at first. We had to develop new tasks for EFL classes which have to be solved in cooperation. Later, these tasks should be tested with pupils from 9th, 10th or 11th class and filmed with a camera to analyze the partner work afterwards. The main goal is to find out which learning strategies the pupils apply to solve the given task.

As we did our work internship at a Gesamtschule during the semester holidays, we found some voluntary pupils in form R10, one of our classes at this time. A short characterization of this learning group follows in Chapter 2. Inspired by our internship we had the idea to develop such tasks which refer to the current topic of this English class, which is America in the 10th grade. We found one caricature in the magazine ¿Der Spiegel¿ and one article on the Internet and created a task out of that. In Chapter 3 we give a detailed description of the developed tasks.

After a brief a-priori analysis (Chapter 4) which describes the expected learning strategies and results for our tasks we will analyze the group work and reveal in Chapter 6 which techniques the students actually applied. This will be the main part of this paper, because everything is described very precise, the learning behavior as well as the results of the tasks. In addition to that, we developed a description of the testing stage which gives an overview of the test day itself. Finally, we will draw a conclusion and give a short outlook on the importance of those tasks for EFL classes.