Network Digital Language-Specific Competencies

© Elke Höfler

Objective

The network “Digital Language-Specific Competencies (DiSKo)” was founded in 2023 in cooperation with Anne-Marie Lachmund (Dresden University of Technology), Manuela Franke (University of Duisburg-Essen), and Elke Höfler (University of Graz).

DiSKo sees itself as a forum for the exchange of subject-specific teaching methods relating to foreign language-specific digital skills among school and university learners.

On the one hand, it aims to pool knowledge for foreign language teaching in schools and to define and promote approaches, methods, and goals for university teacher training. The goal is to outline and raise awareness of this field, which is still in its infancy in foreign language teaching.
The focus is on the Romance languages French, Spanish, and Italian. At the same time, it is interested in exchanges with the teaching of other foreign languages and with other related disciplines (e.g., media studies, media education, linguistics, literature, and cultural studies).
Conferences, lecture series, and discussion groups will be used to present recent work and research results with the aim of providing forward-looking impetus for the development of foreign language-specific digital skills in subject-specific didactic research and teaching practice.
The network is aimed at interested subject didactics specialists, teachers, and students.

In addition to operationalizing foreign language-specific digital skills, we want to focus primarily on implementation in the classroom. To this end, we would like to bring together stakeholders from the fields of media and subject didactics, schools, and universities to develop concepts for innovative teacher training while also shaping support for foreign language learners in a culture of digitality (Stalder 2016). We want to create spaces where experiences, materials, and examples of best practices can be exchanged and critically reflected upon, act as critical friends, and initiate reading circles for joint projects.

Starting point

The digital transformation is not only having a profound impact on schools and society, but is also bringing about significant changes in cultural techniques, working methods, and modes of reception, which are particularly evident in (foreign) language teaching. It is not only new communication tools that are changing the way foreign languages are used; digital media are opening up new avenues of access to language, culture, and communication—but at the same time, they are presenting teachers with new challenges in terms of subject matter and media didactics. Language learning with, about, through, despite, and without digital media (including AI) is also being negotiated, under the changed circumstances of hybridization, self-determination, informality, etc. Teachers and teacher trainees must therefore not only master digital tools technically, but also use them in a didactically reflective and subject-specific manner.

In summary, several problem areas can currently be outlined that affect the topic of digital language-specific skills in both research and teaching practice:

• The “foreign language-specific digital competence” (KMK 2023: 25) newly introduced in the updated educational standards for the first foreign language provides guidance, but this must be defined and outlined in a subject-specific manner and prepared separately for both perspectives, that of the learner (MPFS 2024) and that of the teacher.
• At this point in time, there is still no common understanding of what digital skills teachers need in foreign language teaching – and how these can be systematically and empirically strengthened in initial and continuing training.
• In practice, it is apparent that many existing digital education offerings are too general and do not take sufficient account of the specific characteristics of foreign language learning in relation to Romance foreign languages taught in schools, such as multilingualism, interaction, diversity, and cultural dimensions.
• There is a growing need for cooperation, knowledge transfer, and co-constructive, joint development of digital teaching and learning concepts within foreign language didactics in order to collaboratively address the new challenges.

Current activities of the DiSKo network

• Lecture at the XIV Italian Studies Day 2026 at the University of Graz by Elke Höfler & Anne-Marie Lachmund on: “AI can do that for me!” – Deskilling and metacognitive inertia as challenges in Italian language teaching
• Preparation of the special issue on digital reading in Spanish teaching in Der Fremdsprachliche Unterricht Spanisch (Friedrich-Verlag, 2026), edited by Manuela Franke & Anne-Marie Lachmund
• Contribution by Manuela Franke & Marta Sánchez Castro in the conference proceedings of the XXIV German Hispanic Studies Conference, edited by Victoria del Valle Luque and Roswitha Rogge (2026)
• Contribution by Manuela Franke & Anne-Marie Lachmund in ON. Learning in the Digital World 24 (2026) on learning myths about digital reading

Past activities of the DiSKo network

• September 22-25, 2025: Members of the network meet in Section 19, “Reading Digital Texts in Foreign Language Teaching: Autonomous, Differentiated, Inclusive,” led by Manuela Franke and Anne-Marie Lachmund, at the 39th Romanistiksymposium 2025, University of Konstanz
  
  Elke Höfler gives a lecture on “Picture-reading goldfish,” in which she presents data collected from a seminar with teacher training students, in which they conducted an experiment on attention span and self-reflection. In doing so, she explores the reading of images and multimodal texts in a culture of digitality.
  
  In her lecture, Iryna Matiiashhnediuk establishes a connection between the digital reading skills of young people and the current war in Ukraine and makes suggestions for adapting materials to improve readability in the digital world.
  
  Anne-Marie Lachmund and Manuela Franke not only introduce the section, but also present a teaching concept and data collected in several seminars with the aim of raising awareness for the promotion of digital foreign language reading in heterogeneous classrooms. This requires new approaches for adapting teaching to individual needs (e.g., to people with neurodiversity, Müller & Campbell 2024) and not only selecting tools, but also testing their functionality in foreign language learning for diversity-sensitive, internally differentiated teaching (Franke & Lachmund 2024).

• April 25, 2025:
  Publication of the conference proceedings “Borders, Border Areas, Borderless Areas. Perspectives in Foreign Language Research,” edited by Nina Kulovics, Olivier Mentz, Thomas Raith (WBV), with a contribution by Anne-Marie Lachmund & Manuela Franke as part of the 30th Congress for Foreign Language Didactics of the DGFF in Freiburg i.Br. (2023).

• February 15, 2025:
  Publication of the special issue on digital reading in Der Fremdsprachliche Unterricht Französisch 193 (Friedrich Verlag). 

• March 11-15, 2025:
  Specialist lecture on “Imagen, concepto, literatura” by Manuela Franke & Marta Sánchez Castro in the section “Dinámicas de transformación: la didáctica del español en procesos de cambio” led by Victoria del Valle Luque and Roswitha Rogge at the XXIV Hispanist Day in Hamburg.

• November 9, 2024:                     
  Organization and hosting of the Italian Teachers' Day 2024, a training course for practicing teachers on the functional use of AI in Italian language teaching at the Technical University of Dresden, led by Anne-Marie Lachmund. Gianni Triantis (Hanover) and Fausto Capponi (Berlin), both teachers and trainers, have been invited to discuss the use of large language models in the classroom to promote writing skills or to design modern lessons.

• October 7, 2024:
  Publication of the conference proceedings “The Interplay of Physical Presence and Digital Virtuality in Romance Language Teaching,” edited by Corinna Koch & Svenja Haberland (Ibidem), with contributions with contributions by Elke Höfler and Anne-Marie Lachmund in the course of the 38th Romance Studies Conference in Leipzig (2023).

• 08/2024–12/2024:    
  Manuela Franke and Anne-Marie Lachmund lead the inter-university teaching project "Creating, receiving, and reflecting on inclusive digital reading environments in foreign languages: Digital reading tools for people with neurodiversity such as ADHD, dyslexia, autism/ASD, and other reading barriers," funded by special inclusion funds from the SMWK 2024, in cooperation with the Universities of Dresden and Potsdam. This project includes seminars with the targeted use of various reading tools, which are reflected upon in accompanying surveys with regard to their functional integration into foreign language teaching.

• August 1, 2024:
  Publication of the conference proceedings “Spanish Teaching Digitally: Interaction, Interdisciplinarity, Intertextuality,” edited by Elke Höfler, Manuela Franke, and Anne-Marie Lachmund (Frank & Timme) in the course of the XXIII Hispanic Studies Conference in Graz (2023).

• September 27-29, 2023:
  Anne-Marie Lachmund & Manuela Franke (“Reading Net Literature between Transgression and Reorientation: A Qualitative Study with French Learners”) and Elke Höfler (“Digitization, digitality, and digital citizenship: Reading in the 21st century”) will give presentations at the 30th DGFF Congress for Foreign Language Didactics at the University of Education in Freiburg.

• September 24–27, 2023:
  Specialist presentations by Anne-Marie Lachmund (“Integrating social media into foreign language teaching – challenges and solutions”) and Elke Höfler ("From media convergence to media literacy: Resolutions and Reorganizations in the Context of a Culture of Digitality“) in the section ”The Interplay of Physical Presence and Digital Virtuality in the Teaching of Romance Languages" led by Svenja Haberland & Corinna Koch at the 38th Romance Studies Day at the University of Leipzig.

• February 22-25, 2023:
  As part of the shared section leadership (Elke Höfler, Anne-Marie Lachmund, Manuela Franke) at the XXIII Hispanist Day 2023 (Section 22 "(Text) Reception in Spanish Teaching – At the Interface of Analog and Digital") at the University of Graz, common goals for research into foreign language-specific digital (reading) competence will be formulated for the first time and intentions for inter-university teaching projects will be announced (with specialist presentations by Nevena Stamenković, Elke Höfler, Anne-Marie Lachmund & Manuela Franke and other members of the network).

• 04/2022 – 04/2023:
  Manuela Franke & Anne-Marie Lachmund receive the “Innovative Teaching Project 2022” award for their project entitled “Competently receiving digital texts in foreign language teaching: a teaching project for creating support offerings based on the individual needs of learners when reading foreign-language websites” from the Center for Quality Development in Teaching and Learning (ZfQ), University of Potsdam.