[Confronting inequality in a differentiated way: proposals for differentiated writing instruction online and at distance]

Abstract

The Coronavirus pandemic has made face-to-face teaching difficult or impossible, and has led teachers and learners to explore new possibilities of teaching and learning in an online format. The heterogeneity of learners in the courses of the Casa de Cultura Alemã of the Universidade Federal do Ceará (CCA) and the online classes implemented from August 2020 also led us to identify new teaching procedures. We observed that heterogeneity in the German courses of the CCA, which was already high before the pandemic, became even greater during the pandemic as a result of the new teaching setting, on the one hand due to an increased level of self-organization and -motivation required, and on the other hand due to the technological conditions of the individual participants. In order to account for this heterogeneity, we asked ourselves how we could implement differentiated methods in virtual classes supported by online tools. We observed particularly high variation within the writing competence of participants. This paper therefore presents differentiated approaches for the practice of writing skills in the online format.

Keywords:
Internal Differentiation; Online teaching; Writing