Mobile Enhanced Language Learning (MELLT) goes OEP: Future skills for prospective English teachers and English lessons

The project took place from 2021 to 2023 at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel at the English Seminar in cooperation with the Center for Teacher Education and SH/GB Quality Development/IPN. The OER materials created were also published on the fOERde platform, but are available on this website as packages for easy download.

The MELLT project

The overarching aim of the project was and is to promote media and foreign language didactic skills, including through the development of adaptable learning and teaching materials for the needs of teachers. Such materials are particularly important for the digitalized society and as part of the professionalization of prospective teachers and will certainly become even more important in the future.

On the one hand, the two-pronged structure of the project envisaged the development of subject-specific didactic self-learning materials on current subject-specific didactic theories, models and methods (e.g. digital literacies). This can serve as support for students in their teacher training and provide teachers with an additional opportunity for self-directed further training.

OER for English lessons

At the center of the project, materials for digitally supported English lessons have been created cooperatively with students in the didactic seminars of the Master of Education since 2022. In cooperation with teachers at schools and at the IQSH, teaching units are also created as OER materials at the Chair of English Didactics as part of the supervised Master’s theses. The continuous evaluation of the materials through close cooperation between the didactics team, English students and teachers at schools is a key feature of quality assurance and also enables English students to gain their first professional experience in the creation of teaching materials in the first phase of their training.

Ultimately, the publication of the developed materials as permanently usable and adaptable OER not only contributes to educational equity, but also enables low-threshold availability for students, practicing teachers and interested parties outside the formal education sector. Supporting teachers in the procurement of high-quality OER is therefore a particularly important concern of the project, as finding such materials on German servers is still associated with hurdles. In addition, publications that contain theoretically sound and thoroughly evaluated materials can offer a certain degree of security for users with regard to the problem of the quality of educational materials published on the Internet.

Further information

Further information and projects can be found as an overview on the pages of the English didactics department at the CAU.

The development of materials for foreign language teaching and research-based and project-oriented teacher training, for example, were driven forward in a sister project from 2020 to 2023 to set up the digital laboratory. The subject didactics department at the English Department also looked into the use of online wikis for collaborative writing (project 2020 – 2022).

We are continuously working on the development of materials for teaching English literature and culture at lower and upper secondary level as well as teacher handouts in collaboration with several specialist publishers. Since 2016, the project has been researching selection criteria for a text corpus of multimodal literary texts suitable for teaching English at lower and upper secondary level.

Documentation

This website is a documentation of the results of the MELLT project and will only be expanded to a limited extent. In addition to the OER materials for English lessons (sorted by possible uses), you will also find general information on OER and further links on the topic. An overview of the events held and the digital lab round off the documentation.