In spring 2017 I taught the elective MA course ILNMULTI4130 – “The Impact of Bilingualism/Multilingualism on Cognitive and Language Abilities”.
In this course, I took a research-led approach to teaching and learning. In particular, not only did the reading list consist of recent scientific articles and a collective volume related to the course subject, but I also tried to link theory to practice in various ways. For instance, I explained notions and constructs from Cognitive Psychology, such as working memory and executive functions in simple ways, and also demonstrated and administered cognitive tasks to my students so that they could reflect on them and investigate themselves which cognitive domain each task taps into. I also got my students actively involved in research by training them to administer experiments, to transcribe and score data, and to write up results in the format of a scientific paper. This was a quite demanding course but at the same time very useful to students interested in this topic. I think that my course smoothly introduced students to the realm of real, high quality research. Although only two students requiring credits attended my course, one of them showed great enthusiasm and motivation, and after she passed the course (with the highest grade), she decided to work on the topic of this course for her MA thesis with me as her supervisor. As expected, in her evaluation of the course, she expressed her high satisfaction with my teaching approach and her learning experience, while providing constructive feedback that will help me further improve the course. Unfortunately, the second student dropped the course because she found it very demanding. It is worth noting that also the first student found it very demanding, but according to her more MA courses should be as demanding as mine as long as they ensure similar learning outcomes.