Innovation in Language Learning

How can university teachers motivate their students to meticulously collect every single written text within one given language course? And to go beyond collection, how can language students be convinced of the importance of the confrontation with their own individual mistakes in written language concerning aspects like morphosyntax, lexicon, orthography, punctuation, and not to forget stylistic coherence and textual cohesion? In this paper, we want to answer these questions and describe a course called German Language and Culture, designed for university students of the Bachelor programme Transcultural Communication at the Department of Translation Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. In the academic year 2015/16 the authors conducted the above mentioned language and culture course, attended by 26 students (25 females, 1 male) at the advanced level of C1 according to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) of the Council of Europe. This course for students who study German as a foreign language took place in the summer term, this means from March until June 2016 with six hours of lessons per week. The teaching methods applied to enhance students’ reflection skills about their writing competence in German as L2 using portfolios and self-assessment will be discussed and critically evaluated in this article.