230165 “Closing the Circle”?! Teaching English in the Digital Age (S) (SoSe 2020)

"Sharing is Caring - Privacy is Theft - Secrets are Lies" - These are the slogans of the social media company "The Circle" in Dave Egger's novel of the same title. The slogans point to the tremendous changes digital media have brought (and may bring in the future) to our lives, inviting us to critical reflection. Needless to say, the digital age brings also with it exciting changes to the way English can be taught, but it also entails new challenges and demands both for teachers and pupils. The Twitter hashtags #twitterlehrerzimmer, #BayernEdu or simply #digitalebildung provide evidence of how heatedly the potentials, drawbacks and possible pitfalls of digital teaching are being discussed right now.

In this course, we will explore the possible uses and limitations of various (digital) media for teaching English as a foreign language. In doing so, we will work constantly with Dave Egger's novel "The Circle" in order to unlock the full potential of a novel for the EFL classroom that has set out to replace classical dystopian texts (such as "1984" and "Brave New World") in German Abitur canons. This work will be complemented by theoretical considerations, e.g. on what can actually be considered "new" in digital media (as compared to analogue media), on digital cultures and their impact on the ELT classroom as well as on key concepts such as "authenticity" and "digital literacies".

Students are expected to have read the novel "The Circle" by the beginning of summer term (please note: the film adaptation differes significantly from the novel ;-) )

This class is taking place as a mixture of asynchronous and synchronous working formats

Bibliography

Dave Eggers. The Circle. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0241970379.