Fostering primary students’ competences for democratic culture in EFL

Abstract The PEACE project was a teaching unit which was designed, implemented and evaluated in two primary school classes in Japan and Germany respectively. The project was carried out in an asynchronous virtual exchange format between the two classes. The Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture was used as a basis for the teaching unit, with the framework’s descriptors for young learners serving as tools for designing and assessing both the teaching unit and its outcomes in the form of the participating students’ products and utterances. Using the NVivo coding software for content analysis, the study investigated the deployment of the various areas of competence by the students during the teaching unit and compared these across the classes. This was done to gain insights into both the context-dependency of the deployment of competences for democratic culture as well as the practicability and potentials of carrying out a bilateral asynchronous virtual exchange aiming to promote competences for democratic culture in young learners.