Some critical reflections
Dr Melani Schröter, Modern Languages and
European Studies
Modern Languages graduates (Franc; Lawton 2008:
5): communication skills, self-management,
interpersonal skills, intellectual skills (critical
thinking), practical and applied skills (finding,
extracting, presenting information)
EBL (Kahn/O’Rourke 2005:1): Students pursue own
line of enquiry, draw on their existing knowledge
and identify the consequent learning needs.
They seek evidence to support their ideas and
take responsibility of analysing and presenting
this appropriately.
Key element in assessment: Group presentations
(involving peer assessment element), group work
portfolio
Dr Melani Schröter, Modern Languages and European Studies
 EBL
teaching project, 2nd year German
history/culture module partly based on
project work in groups
 Objectives:
- Higher level of students’ engagement with
module content
- Enhance students’ research and academic
writing skills
- Students engage with each other over
content, team work experience
- Active learning (Hutchings 2007:12)
Dr Melani Schröter, Modern Languages and European Studies
“it made us as individuals and as a group much
more active in our learning”
“Time management is another skill that we
have developed…By setting targets for our
group meetings we found them more
productive…”
“We managed to adjust to each other’s way of
learning and were pleasantly surprised that
we were able to do this so well.”
Dr Melani Schröter, Modern Languages and European Studies
Guidance regarding scope of topic  students
triggered to wrap these up into distinguishable
projects (2 groups)
 Guidance regarding resources (reading list, historical
documents)  students identify material relevant to
them
 Guidance regarding group work management
 Guidance for the group work portfolio
 Discussion/agreement of assessment framework
 Process management metadiscourse too much for
small module
 Positive experience to agree on assessment
framework with students, but group work accounted
for with portfolio – marking criteria?

Dr Melani Schröter, Modern Languages and European Studies
 outcomes; activation – yes, but ‘deeper
interest’?
 Not genuinely enquiring; topic set, not based
on previous knowledge
 Genuine exploration of topic/resources more
difficult with limited material, large part of
it in target language
 Variety of topics taught in ML difficult to
build enquiry on the basis of systematic
progress on the content side (language
classes may be more suitable)
Dr Melani Schröter, Modern Languages and European Studies
Very worthwhile experience
- for students learning together
- For lecturer teaching an established module in a
different way
 Difficulties:
- amount of moderation required
- marking the process (?) or just the outcome
  from students’ perspective: increased
workload
- the place of EBL/PBL in the ML content
curriculum

Dr Melani Schröter, Modern Languages and European Studies