What becomes immediately apparent in looking through current teaching materials – particularly language texts from the middle and northern European immigration countries – is that in contrast to earlier schoolbooks, they contain a great number of instructions, tips and techniques for individual learning. These suggestions directly address the students and support them with the following questions:
- How do you solve learning problems when reading?
- How do you orient yourselves in reference works and on the internet?
- How do you recognize what is important in reading a text?
- How do you plan the structure of a text or a presentation?
- How do you provide good feedback in a conversation?
- How can you identify to which part of speech a word belongs?
Hints, techniques or strategies of this kind were hardly ever taught in previous textbooks. The focus then was the mediation of factual knowledge or general expertise – e. g. in grammar – the training of this technical expertise through reproductive exercises. In many countries and cultures, this is still more or less the case today. This is also reflected in the fact that in those countries and languages there are few, if any publications devoted to learning techniques and strategies, whereas those in the central and northern European countries fill entire bookshelves.
The reasons for these differences are the developments in and focal points on the new pedadogy, didactics and methodology in the immigration countries. These are described in detail in Part II of the handbook and workbook “Foundations and backgrounds” (see chapters 3–6). To mention just a few of the keywords, the higher emphasis on autonomous learning vs guided learning, the new understanding of the role of the instructor as learning coach, the orientation of classroom instruction not primarily on the substance of the program, but on the learners themselves and on developing and expanding their competences. Moreover, the recognition that factual knowledge becomes quickly obsolete in our fast-paced and highly mediatized world, whereby it becomes increasingly important to have acquired the techniques and strategies for information gathering and know-how to help oneself. (Example: those who only learned a bunch of facts in natural science or history are less competent than those who know how to acquire and process new information from the internet or from reference works, and to process and implement that information into a good presentation, for instance.)
As a consequence, the mediation of strategic knowledge (strategies for using information, learning and problem solving strategies) versus the mediation of pure factual knowledge occupies a significantly broader space in the more recent middle and northern European teaching traditions. This is reflected in classroom teaching and in the teaching materials, as well as in the fact that we are devoting an entire volume to the topic of learning strategies and techniques in the series “Materials for heritage language teaching”.