Students help refugees with learning German

2022-11-15 Lüneburg. The project "Students Support Language Learning" (S3) has now begun at Leuphana University Lüneburg. It aims to bring together interested students and young people who want to learn German as a second language to form learning communities. The project comes at the right time, because in view of the sharp increase in the number of refugee children and young people since the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, there is a great demand for language learning opportunities. Schools and extracurricular institutions in the city and district of Lüneburg face particular challenges.

To qualify the students for their task, there are preparatory workshops, feedback from other students, help with lesson planning and material selection as well as a variety of reflection offers in the specialist language library. Prof. Dr. Astrid Neumann from the Institute for German Language and Literature and its Didactics at Leuphana heads the project, which is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science.

In addition to providing individual support for students starting out in schools and other educational institutions, the project offers students a special qualification in the fields of German as a second language, heterogeneity and migration. Schools and teachers also benefit from the support of specially trained students.

The institute already has a network of partner organisations. Thanks to this cooperation, the concrete challenges of practice can be directly integrated into university teaching-learning spaces. Other educational institutions interested in collaborating in the field of teaching German to refugees can contact Leuphana at luise_charlotte.wendt@leuphana.de.

The project is initially planned to run until the end of next year; an extension is in prospect.

Further information:

www.leuphana.de/institute/idd/personen/astrid-neumann/studierende-stuetzen-sprachlernen-s3.html