The concept of learning by teaching has now become part of modern didactics and foreign language teaching, because everyone has experienced the effect of understanding something for themselves when they tell others about it. Obviously, the human brain loves it when you talk about complex contexts. Research in cognitive science has found out that it is demonstrably relevant for the processing of knowledge that information is evaluated and hierarchised, because that is what one does automatically, so to speak, when one puts a thought into language.
If this phenomenon is consciously embedded in the teaching process, learners also experience enormous self-efficacy, social recognition and meaningfulness in the learning process, which leads to success in the learning process for both high-performing and low-performing learners.
In learning through teaching, learners develop content independently and share the acquired knowledge with the other learners, focusing on communication within the group. In order to facilitate this interaction within the group, the tasks usually consist of joint problem solving. The group thereby sees itself as a whole, whereby stable interaction structures can develop. In addition to the processing of information in terms of content, the acquisition of knowledge, other elementary skills such as the ability to work in a team and to compromise are trained.
In learning through teaching, material content is cognitively penetrated on the part of the learners and then exchanged between the learners through intensive communication. So that the subject matter can be communicated, the simultaneous use of necessary language structures for the transfer of communication is necessary. This is the special effect for foreign language learning, i.e. the language is both the means and the end of the discussion.
In learning through teaching, teachers are mainly present in the background, but this does not mean that they do not steer and regulate. They do intervene actively and continuously in the process, namely whenever it is necessary to prevent individual learners from going underground and leaving the work to the others.