Description of the concept 'Learning German like Robinson Crusoe - the economics course as part of the university summer course 2021'

Abstract

The article gives an overview of a task-based learning scenario for a German economics course. The concept, developed and offered for a summer course at the University Language Centre of the Universität Münster in 2021, provides a new approach to combining language-related and subject-specific goals to encourage academic language use for economists in the second language acquisition process. The core idea behind the concept is creating a scenario of being shipwrecked on a lonely island as an initial situation for analyzing economic theories and actions. This scenario runs like a continuous thread throughout the course. It allows us to take a closer look at the basic scientific theories and models in economic studies using technical vocabulary and grammatical structures derived from an academic perspective.