Jean-Pol Martin
Encyclopedia
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
) is a professor
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...
for foreign language teaching in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. He established the teaching method "Lernen durch Lehren" (learning by teaching
Learning by teaching
In professional education, learning by teaching designates currently the method by Jean-Pol Martin that allows pupils and students to prepare and to teach lessons, or parts of lessons...
), a method for students to learn by teaching their peers. This concept has developed into a common practice throughout Germany and has been experimented with in other countries.
Biography
Martin was born in 1943 in Paris and went to Germany in 1968. He studied GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
in order to become a teacher at a German grammar school
Grammar school
A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and some other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching classical languages but more recently an academically-oriented secondary school.The original purpose of mediaeval...
, becoming a professor for foreign language teaching didactics
Didactics
A didactic method is a teaching method that follows a consistent scientific approach or educational style to engage the student’s mind.The didactic method of instruction is often contrasted with dialectics and the Socratic method; the term can also be used to refer to a specific didactic method,...
at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Bavaria) in 1980. In the same year he had the idea to let the students teach their peers in his French classes. That experience was successful, so he could establish the "Lernen durch Lehren" (LdL) (learning by teaching) method in Germany. He was the first scholar to do active research on that topic for 25 years, building a wide network with several thousand teachers and promoting it to a large scale. All teachers in Germany are now trained in that method during their pedagogic studies.