Sheila Watts
This paper looks at
the ways in which learners develop the skill of speaking German and questions
the ways in which different speech styles are prioritised. It is observed that speech tends to be the
skill which is concentrated on in the early stages of language acquisition, and
that it is comparatively neglected at advanced level. As a result of the privileging of types of discourse which have
more in common with written texts than with naturally-occurring speech – ‘real
German’ – university students going abroad tend to have poor interactional
skills and low levels of pragmatic knowledge, which makes it difficult for them
to integrate and form relationships with their German-speaking peers. It is suggested that a study of the
linguistic analysis of ordinary conversation can help students to improve their
pragmatic competence and hence to have a more pleasurable and profitable
encounter with the German-speaking world.
Since the use of new media in communication has resulted in a diminution
of the importance of formal writing, an increased understanding of spoken German
is also a necessary skill for the students’ future careers.
1. Introduction
1.1.
Progression in Language
Learning
In the earliest
stages of second language acquisition, communicative language teaching, like
its immediate methodological predecessors, the direct and audio-visual methods,
depends on the learner building up competence through listening, and speaking
initially in conversational routines – memorised, unanalysed expressions which
perform certain communicative functions – greeting, expressing thanks,
apologising and so on (Ellis 1994: 84).
In order to facilitate this kind of learning, which mirrors first
language acquisition (Aijmer 1996: 7), language coursebooks for the beginner
typically present the target language in the form of dialogues where each
participant speaks briefly in a short turn, and which are structured around
adjacency pairs, that is, utterances with a conventional, obligatory
sequencing, such as greetings sequences (guten
Morgen - guten Morgen) or
expressions of thanks (danke – bitte).
Although learners are introduced to these dialogues in recorded form,
full transcripts are printed in the coursebook, enabling the learner not only
to listen and repeat, but also to use the written version of the dialogue as an
aid to committing the exact form of the words to memory before attempting to
embark on creative variation. This is a
necessary stage, both because the most conventionalised structures are
invariable, and because many of the structures memorised will not yet be
grammatically analysable by the learner, who will acquire, for instance, guten Morgen before knowing that
adjectives have endings, and ich möchte
gern before understanding the concept of the subjunctive.
At more advanced
stages of the course, the linguistic input is increasingly made up of
originally written texts, rather than of transcribed spoken texts, and
dialogues are utilised primarily in listening comprehension tasks. The nature of these exercises is to require
learners to listen in the same way as they would to their native language,
concentrating on the message rather than the medium: “im allgemeinen merken wir
uns beim Hören nicht die einzelnen Formulierungen, sondern wir verarbeiten das
Gehörte zu abstrakteren Informationseinheiten” (Schwitalla 1997: 26). At this level, the text of the dialogue is
no longer printed in the coursebook, partly for fear that advance preparation
by learners will negate the value of the listening comprehension task, but also
because the form of this less routinized speech is not seen as intrinsically
interesting by coursebook authors.[1] Thus audio texts are heard once or twice in
the classroom and then become unavailable to the learners, whose primary
linguistic input comes from the written texts which are offered as models for
both written and spoken exercises. As
an example, in em Abschlusskurs a
text on the development of aspirin is the stimulus for a speaking task, holding
a discussion about the ethics of medical research. Preparation for speaking consists of some brief suggestions of
possible lines of argument, and a list of discursive Redemittel /Redewendungen
such as “Lassen Sie uns folgendes Ergebnis festhalten: …”, “Also, Sie haben
mich überzeugt. Ich schließe mich Ihrem Vorschlag an” „Ich sehe Vorteile darin, dass...” (Perlmann-Balme et al. 1999:
98). This kind of presentational
strategy, where learners are offered only the opening phrase or clause of what
is expected to be a long conversational turn, is typical of almost all advanced
learners’ books: Der treffende Ausdruck
offers examples like “Ich muß Ihnen widersprechen”, “Ich bin derselben Meinung”
(Turneaure 1996: 31, 56). In these
exercises learners are given to understand that a written text can be turned
into a spoken one simply by being prefixed by a ‘spoken expression’. Indeed, the authors of Kenntnisse even observe that forms like “Die Verhandlungen bleiben
immer noch ohne Resultat” or “eine Änderung in den Details hat sich als
notwendig erwiesen” are worth learning from memory for use “in both spoken
debate and essay-writing” (Burke et al. 1999:
276-281).
It is clear from
this brief summary that the nature of the spoken German that learners are
expected to produce is perceived as developing away from the short turn with an
interactional function – maintaining relationships between speakers – to the
long turn with a transactional function, that is, transferring
information. A series of assumptions
and theories underlie the observed coursebook structure. Firstly, it appears that students need
explicit instruction in speaking the foreign language only at the start, after
which their native language rhetorical skills will enable them to do the
rest. This is questioned by Brown and
Yule, who argue that “simply training the student to produce short turns will
not automatically yield a student who can perform satisfactorily in long turns”
(Brown & Yule 1983: 19). A second
pedagogical assumption emerges from one of the main tenets of the communicative
approach, that “in real life as in the classroom, most tasks of any complexity
involve more than one macroskill […] Where possible these skills should be
integrated” in a communicative syllabus (Nunan 1989: 22). This notion of integration has led in
practice to a blurring of the functions of different skills, which are presented
to learners in terms of their communicative and functional similarities rather
than in terms of their contrasts: essay writing and spoken debate are seen as
fundamentally alike, not fundamentally different. A third, more ideological assumption, is observable through the
choice of text-types for advanced spoken discourse, which are confined almost
entirely to debates on social or political issues, with interviews playing a
smaller role.[2] This appears to reflect a hierarchical
notion of the intellectual or academic value of different kinds of content,
where the spoken discourse which is selected for the advanced learner being
that which is closest to written text-types.
Thus even in communicative courses, the traditional prestige value of
the written text is maintained.
1.2.
Progression from school to
university
The traditional
distribution of the stages of language learning between school and university
means that increasingly, the schools’ role is perceived from the university
perspective as falling at the earlier, speech-focused end of the sequence,
while the universities’ role is to work on written skills. In fact, this perception of what happens in
schools is valid, at least in terms of British syllabuses, only for 11-16
year-olds. In the National Curriculum
for England and Wales, for instance, the syllabus lists eleven points on
“communicating in the target language” of which eight are exclusively or
largely devoted to speaking, two to reading and one to writing, while of the
fifteen “language skills” listed, again eight focus on speaking, four on
reading and listening and three on writing.[3] At school-leaving level, although Boaks
reports that all four skills are at present weighted equally at A-level and
Scottish Highers (1998: 37), the new syllabuses for 2001 rate speaking at a
more modest third of the overall marks, and a fifth in Northern Ireland.
Writing at GCSE and
A levelis closely
associated with reading and listening, and learners write some answers in
English (“exercises requiring the transfer of meaning”). Student written production on starting third
level shows signs of a concentration at school level on routines and formulas
for writing, phrases such as es liegt
auf der Hand, es ist nicht zu leugnen, and this shows the early stage
of the writing curve, where again the target skill is approached through the
memorisation of unanalysed chunks. Despite
syllabus changes it is therefore probably still valid to argue that a university
language syllabus “concentrates on the written language rather than the spoken
language and thus makes up for the deficit in the production of extended written
discourse which undergraduates inherit from their language programmes in school”
(West 1992a: 32).
At university, as
at school, although the balance may be different, both written and spoken German
are explicitly taught. In a small
informal survey carried out recently, the thirty-four higher education
institutions which responded reported that they taught oral German to all
students at all levels, although six respondents noted that their language
courses were ‘integrated’, with speaking tied to writing, sometimes explicitly
essay-writing.[4] However, practice in dealing with the spoken
language, as revealed by assessment procedures, shows that both at school
leaving level and in the universities, authentic speech, ‘real German’, is
losing out steadily to prepared or scripted speech. In all of the school syllabuses investigated, oral exams involve
extensive advanced preparation, even for role-plays, where dictionaries are
often permitted, and presentations are made without scripts, but with the use
of a ‘cue-card’. In several syllabuses even the section of the oral devoted to
‘general conversation’ relies heavily on prepared topics which are known to, or
selected by candidates in advance. The only exception is the Northern Irish
syllabus, where conversation is unprepared – but also given a lower weighting
in the marks. At university level too,
twenty-five of the thirty-four respondents described their oral exams as being
based on prepared material, ranging from ‘prescribed topics’, through oral
summaries of read or heard texts to ‘presentations’ and ‘mini-Referate’. Clearly assessment procedures are only part
of the picture, and it must be assumed that most classroom discourse is
unprepared, but it is reasonable to suppose, on the basis of the well-known
‘backwash-effect’ whereby what is examined influences what is taught, that in
systems where only prepared discourse is tested, unprepared discourse will
enjoy a less privileged position, and students will be less eager to learn it
actively.
As will be shown
in the next section, there is a marked difference in terms of authenticity
between prepared and spontaneous speech, with the former sharing many
characteristics with written language.
Just as students who can do short turns may be unable to do long turns,
so students who can prepare a role-play or a presentation may be unable to cope
with natural speech, which requires rapid adaptation to the unexpected. It is not the purpose of this paper to argue
against the teaching of written language, or even against the teaching of
spoken language which resembles written language closely – merely to draw
attention to the deficits in spoken language syllabuses which leave off things
like spontaneous speech for learners over the age of 16, and to ask if this can
be remedied.
2. ‘Real German’:
authentic speech
Spoken German
displays a high level of variability not only between speakers, depending on
factors such as their country and region of origin, age, gender and level of
education, but also within the speech of the individual, depending on context
in the shape of, for instance, topic, role, relative status and degree of
familiarity of the interlocutors.
Nowadays in most circumstances German speakers use neither standard Hochdeutsch nor traditional dialects,
but rather regionale Umgangssprachen
which are used over large areas and at a range of levels of formality. This has scarcely been reflected in the kind
of German taught to foreigners, where an attempt has been made to sustain the
fiction of an “abstraktes Standarddeutsch” (Krumm 1997: 134), a variety which
is close to the written norm and which has the virtue of being universally
understood. This creates the impression
for the learner that language attitudes in German-speaking countries mirror
those found in Britain (or more specifically England), and that regional
varieties are stigmatised. Durrell
observes that . despite recent trends, regional identities are still
strong and varieties prestigious in many cases, because the standard Hochdeutsch is “widely held to be
distant and alien and inappropriate for informal use – its origin as the formal
written language of an élite, without geographical roots, is significant here”
(Durrell 1992: 21). This position of
the written language as a formal variety learnt at school, combined with the
relative prestige of regional varieties, means that the gap between spoken and
written German is far wider than that between spoken and written English.[5] The topic of regional and social variation
goes beyond the scope of the present paper, but it must be noted as a
significant barrier to the teaching of authentic spoken German.
The written language : spoken
language contrast is not a polar opposition, but a continuum along which
different text-types fall according to a series of criteria, with, for example,
a legal text having more written characteristics than a personal letter, while
an interview with a politician has fewer spoken characteristics than a
conversation around the family breakfast table (Schwitalla 1997: 19). The linguistic analysis of spoken discourse
– ‘conversation’ or ‘talk’ – generally confines itself to the description of
language around the spoken pole of this opposition, which is defined as being
unplanned and spontaneous, rather than speech based on speakers “reproducing
expressions of opinion which they have thought a lot about, mentally
‘rehearsed’ or uttered on previous occasions” (Brown & Yule 1983: 4). Spoken language as it occurs in natural contexts
is dialogic, not monologic: it is “essentially co-operative” (Wardhaugh 1985:
1) and has an “innere Gesellschaftlichkeit” (Schwitalla 1997: 11). This means that the participants have to
manage their interaction and negotiate meaning:
a) SIE: da geht man in ein schön
heiratspalast/ [Pause] da: bezahlt man [Pause] na ich weiß nich wieviel geld
dafür/ dann hat man bißchen bißchen musik/ un-dann hält irgend-n bezirksleiter
noch-ne ansprache/ und dann werden pro tach viersich ehen geschlossen \ alles kühl
und sachlich \
ER: ja das genücht ja auch\
SIE: ja / [Pause] mir nich\
ER: also mir genücht die
formalitet daß es auf-m pepier steht/ schön/ also:\ [Pause] gehört mir nun
endlich\ ja/ das genücht mir\
SIE: ja/ äh i eh [Pause]
ja vielleicht/ aber ich meine
ER: ich brauch da nich
noch großartich eine eine [Pause] eine bestetijung von vom pastor/und so\
SIE: nein paß mal auf\[6]
b) INTERVIEWER: Muß denn ein
Lehrling, der zu Ihnen kommt, schon eine bestimmte Ausbildung haben, oder fängt
der ganz von vorne an?
MÜLLER: Ja, es gibt welche, die
wollen von vorne anfangen, sind aber
mesitens dazu schon zu alt, weil sie bei uns komischerweise immer erst
mit 27 so was ankommen. Da hat alles andere nicht geklappt offenbar. Und dann
kommen sie ins Theater und meinen, sie müßten künsterlisch arbeiten, das wird
dann sehr schwer. Weil solche Leute haben noch gar nichts praktisch gemacht
meistens, ja.
(Authentik:
A19, see West 1992b)
The texts are
marked as spoken German through phonetic and morphological features (elision,
loss of word-final sounds, regionally marked pronunciation indicated in text
a), syntax (non-hierarchical paratactic constructions), and discourse features
such as repetitions and pauses. The
rhetorical organisation of the texts features typical turn-openers in informal
discourse – ja (gut), also – which in
longer extracts we could expect to be joined by ja und and ja aber: Narrative, exemplificatory parts of the text are linked with und dann, opinions marked by ich meine (also ich finde) (Schwitalla 1997: 54-55). The texts are coherent and cohesive, using pro-forms (ein Lehrling - der) and ellipsis of
redundant information ([sie] sind aber
meistens) to achieve this. In the opening turn of text a) the use of da creates a structure with recursive
theme which is “especially characteristic of spoken language” (West 1992b: 51).
The dynamic nature of the conversation is illustrated by the clarification and
limitation which ER offers for the das
in das genücht ja auch.
The differences
between texts a) and b) and speech written especially for the language learner
are very striking, as we see in the following example, a stimulus for
discussion from em Abschlusskurs:
Ich fürchte, Ihr
Standpunkt geht etwas an der Realität vorbei. Es ist doch so: Was in dem
Zeitungsartikel berichtet wird, kann jederzeit auch bei uns passieren. Bei uns
gibt es auch Tiere, die für den Menschen (bzw. seinen Lebensraum) gefährlich
werden, und zwar ... (Perlmann-Balme et al.
1999: 13).
This extract
demonstrates again that what is printed in coursebooks seems designed to give
learners the message that spoken and written language are formally very
close. However, in recognition that
conventions for scripted dialogue are in fact “characteristically different
from the conventions of structures in naturally occurring conversation” (Brown
& Yule 1983: 33), most modern coursebooks use authentic audio
material.
One further
characteristic of talk which is important here, in that it is highly
problematical from a pedagogical point of view, is that conversation is
purposeful: “speakers have a social or personal reason to speak. There is an
information gap to be filled, or an area of uncertainty to be made clear. What
is said is potentially interesting or useful to the participants” (Pattison
1997: 7). And the converse is also
true: “most naturally occurring conversations are extremely boring unless you
happen to be an active engaged participant” (Brown & Yule 1983: 33). Personal matters of transitory significance
form the topic of most talk, while socio-political issues like animal rights,
medical ethics or compulsory speed limits are authentic topics only for
individuals with a special interest in them.
The material presented as speech in coursebooks is thus authentic only
for a small group of speakers, which can only by chance include the learners
who are given the task of talking about it.
Conversation is thus authentic or inauthentic in the dimensions of both
form and content. The role of form and
content in language teaching is one which has of course been widely discussed
in the literature, but its special significance in the teaching of talk needs
to be noted here.
3. Why should university
students of German study talk?
University students are
motivated to learn German both for personal long-term reasons, and to fulfil
shorter term goals which are set by the higher education institution. According
to a large-scale survey of British students, the majority study German for
their future career, because of a wish to travel and because they like the
language (Coleman 1996: 193). In terms
of specifically linguistic goals, a smaller and more recent study has shown
that about three-quarters of the respondents hope to achieve ‘fluency’: despite
this strong orientation towards speech, however, over a third of the
respondents stated that they actually spoke German for less than an hour per
week (Elspaß 1999: 465 - 466). Reasons
cited for not speaking more were large class sizes, small number of hours of tuition,
and for a significant number, fear of grammatical error, with a quarter
considering that their main difficulties in speaking German involved gender and
adjective endings (Elspaß 1999: 462).
This perception, probably a result of the focus of error remediation by
teachers, should be inappropriate in its application to speech given that in
natural conversation there are so many demands on the speaker that “he [sic.]
is by no means free to concentrate on the grammatical content of his
productions” (quoted in Aijmer 1996: 9).
The goals which
the institution imposes on students are twofold: firstly, the requirement to
succeed in examination and assessment, and secondly, the requirement to spend a
period abroad, usually a compulsory year at most British and Irish
institutions. The practice of using
prepared material in oral examinations at schools and universities has already
been noted in the first section. From
section two, it will be apparent that prepared discourse falls closer to the
written than to the spoken pole of the linguistic continuum, on a number of
grounds. On the set of variables by which Schwitalla judges these
relationships, any oral exam will tend towards the written end by virtue of
being a relatively distanced and formal means of communication, where one
participant is privileged over the other in determining the topic and probably
in managing the discourse by deciding when to begin and end turns, and by
requiring the other participant to take longer turns (1997: 18-19). If the conversation is also non-spontaneous,
partly prepared and monologic, this places it towards the written pole by six
out of nine formal criteria. By any
standards this relativises the value of such exams as tests of spoken German. The issue of content is another
problematical factor in such presentations, since in many cases it is not
seriously tested, which means that “the speaker can[not] see a reasonable
purpose for the task at hand”: the levels of knowledge of examiner and examinee
are also an issue, as “we do not normally tell people what they obviously know
already” (Brown & Yule 1983: 111).
The purposeless nature of the oral exam – which superficially resembles
a Referat, but which is delivered to
a single very well-informed listener – may be a factor in determining the
student assumption that it is genders and adjective endings which will be
judged most important.
From the
institutional point of view, oral exams based on prepared material may be
intended as a way of demonstrating that content is taken seriously, and hence
by extension that the oral exam has a serious academic character, and is worthy
of the proportion of marks which it commands.
Again, this reflects the prestige value which is attached to written and
written-like texts.
Students’ goals during the
year abroad are varied. Just over half of all students of German go to study at
universities, and a fifth each to be English language teaching assistants and
to other work placements (Coleman 1996).
At least one important aim of going abroad is to improve linguistic
skills, and Elspaß refers to students at the start of their final year as being
“auf dem Höhepunkt ihrer fremdsprachlichen Kompetenz” (1999: 466). For this very reason – as well as, perhaps,
a certain pressure from quality assessors to integrate time spent abroad into
the study programme as a whole – a
third of the institutions which responded to the informal questionnaire note
that they already make arrangements to hold the oral exam closer to the year
abroad than other examinations, and a further five respondents said that such a
change was either contemplated, or was considered desirable but impossible for
practical reasons. It is debatable,
however, whether the year abroad prepares the students in any but the most
general way for the kind of oral examinations which they encounter, given the
absence of any authentic model for the text-types in which they are
examined. The effects of the students’
age may be particularly noted here, since the formal modes of discourse which
are examined are rarely encountered amongst this group, being more appropriate
to older speakers.
“Writing and
speaking are not just alternative ways of doing the same things: rather they
are ways of doing different things” (Halliday 1999: xv). The task to which talk is best suited is
that of building relationships with other people, and the ambition of making
friends while abroad is one which probably all students share. However,
students who have not developed their interactional skills beyond what was
learnt in the early years of their schooling, and who are accustomed to basing
their spoken style on formal written German, will find it difficult to get to
know their peers. Many former students
of German have testified to the culture shock they experienced on first
visiting a German-speaking country for a prolonged period and discovering the
gap between native and learner German.
If students are nervous to speak for fear of the wrong adjective ending
or because of the lack of vocabulary, they will not be able to keep pace with
the demands of normal conversation, while concentrating on grammar rather than
on being co-operative in terms of giving and seeking feedback, listening and
adapting to the hearer and other features of dynamic talk will make them very
inadequate conversational partners. Institutions frequently complain that
students join English-speaking ghettos during the year abroad on the assumption
that this is caused by a lack of
self-confidence, rather than by inadequate linguistic preparation.
One of the aspects
of talk which is most neglected at university level because it is only marginal
to academic discourse is socio-cultural and pragmatic competence, the knowledge
of communicative norms which makes it possible for people to function in a
society without being considered offensive, rude or odd. Saville-Troike observes that “the discovery
of communicative norms is most obvious in their breach” (1989: 137), and this
can be serious. Pragmatic failure, when
a learner does not know the appropriate routine for a particular context, such as
receiving a compliment or expressing gratitude, may cause a situation where
learners “deprive themselves of the opportunities to establish relationships
with native speakers and, thereby, of the input that they need to develop both
their linguistic and sociolinguistic competence” (Ellis 1994: 165). Lack of interactional competence is thus a
vicious circle: students whose German is not adequate to make friends speak
English, and so they fail to improve their German.
As I have written
elsewhere, the level of culture clash which occurs between German and English
native speakers is often underestimated, mainly because of different norms of
politeness (Watts 1994). That article
examined a number of situations, such as those where punctuality, borrowing
money and apologising are concerned, where English speakers perceive normal
German behaviour is unacceptably direct and rude, while German speakers may
find their English-speaking counterparts rude, dishonest and hypocritical
respectively. A more substantial study
by House and Kasper shows that in key areas such as making complaints, German
learners of English make pragmatic errors involving too much directness and too
few modality markers, and that these too cause English native speakers to
regard them as impolite (1981: 158). House and Kasper conclude from the
negative effects that this perception has on the success of the language
learning experience that “the interpretation and use of politeness” ought to be
explicitly taught in language courses,
in order to prevent “impolite, ineffective or otherwise inappropriate
behavior on the part of the learner” (1981: 184). Politeness can be taught in the context of written language as
well, of course, especially in the context of letter-writing, but it is
particularly important in conversation because of the short time span available
to the speaker for choosing an appropriate utterance.
Only a learner who
can behave appropriately in different situations without either causing or
being affected by culture clash, can be considered to have acquired true
intercultural competence. Concern is
sometimes expressed that such a requirement amounts to a demand for “cultural
assimilation” and for the “systematic imitation of all things native”, thus
abandoning the perspective of ‘otherness’ which is a natural part of
intercultural contact (Jones 1998: 8).
It is not contended that students should lose their anchor in their own
culture during their time abroad. It is
necessary, however, for them to adapt to another attitudinal framework, in
which they may develop a more differentiated concept of the nature of
politeness, for example, as a failure to do so will result in a failure to
build relationships across the cultural divide.
4. Feasibility. The
future of talk in German at university
It emerges from the preceding
sections that student need to improve their interactional skills if they are to
benefit fully from their year abroad, and that they need institutional support,
ideally in the form of both tuition and testing, if they are to achieve this
goal. It has been established that students have a rather low level of exposure
to the form of authentic spoken discourse, since they hear it in contexts where
their attention is on its message, and rarely have the opportunity to see it transcribed. One difficulty in exposing students to this
kind of material is that many teachers are reluctant to allow students to look
at forms in writing which are ‘wrong’, and there may be a particular unwillingness
to do this in German, given the extent to which the spoken language diverges
from written norms, and the strong association of those written norms with the
educational process. This suggests that
it may be culturally difficult actually to teach students to produce German
like that found in texts a) and b) above.
Pedagogically, too, the
teaching and examining of interactional speech present problems, because of the
difficulty of finding interlocutors who can engage in purposeful authentic
talk. Brown & Yule point out that
it is “hard to sustain institutionalised ‘chat’ for timetabled periods of time”
(1983: 32), and this was our experience in Dublin when we attempted to enliven
conversation classes by replacing them with ‘clubs’ founded on student
interests - music, sport, politics, film, food and so on. Although some enthusiastic students profited
enormously from expanding their vocabularies on topics which were of genuine
interest to them, the majority lacked the motivation to attend a programme which
was not seen as wholly serious. Once again, the low prestige of conversation
militated against it.
However, these difficulties
need not prevent students being taught about this kind of text through
linguistic study, which might in this case be seen as a kind of ‘para-language
learning’. Students can successfully be
shown how conversations work by analysing transcripts of talk in both English
and German, since some of the phenomena are universal, and this can fruitfully
lead to discussions of many politeness norms as well as of discourse strategies. The topics which students bring up in this
kind of tuition in my experience cover important areas of intercultural
difference like the handshake, the use of combinations of Sie - du, titles, first
names and surnames, the relative frequency of direct questions and imperatives
in different types of discourse and languages, and many others. Such a course can also provide a reason to
look at some of the functional grammars which exist to support this kind of
learning, and which describe conversational routines in some detail, such as
Weinrich (1993) and Dodd et al (1996), thus expanding the range of reference
works which students have the skills to use.
Finally, in teaching students “about the different cultural environment
in which [German] is spoken”, we would be fulfilling what Durrell suggests
should be “one of the prime aims of the study of a foreign language at
university level” (1992: 23).
The proposal, then, is to
teach interaction in a course which would represent a meeting-point between the
‘content’ and the ‘language’ elements of a programme of study. This course
would be placed prior to the period spent abroad so that students could profit
to the largest possible extent from the skills it gave them to make friends and
integrate into German culture. The interactional skills acquired in this way
could then be tested on the student’s return in an informal oral exam, the
content of which would be the cultural differences which students had noted
during their year abroad, and which would have the form of a ‘debriefing’ on
the year abroad. Indeed, some
institutions use a form of this procedure already, and make the exercise more
purposeful by videoing the sessions so that they also provide informative
material for subsequent students.
The introduction of a course
such as this would leave institutions free to base the final oral exam on a
more monologic style in order to give full rein to the need for intellectual
content. In ideal circumstances this
test would be designed so that some kind of information gap was involved, thus
lessening the communicative stress on the candidate by making the event
relevant and purposeful. Probably the
simplest way of doing this is to have the student talk about their dissertation,
a topic on which their knowledge is likely to be more expert than that of the
examiner. There are, however, other
ways of injecting a degree of authenticity into the situation, for example by
allowing the student to give the examiner a list of questions to which the
latter may expect to learn the
answers during the presentation. An
almost completely authentic situation could be created by asking the examiner
to issue a list of current films which s/he has not yet seen, so that the
student could present a review, and then discuss the likelihood that the
examiner would enjoy the film on the basis of revealed tastes and
interests.
5. Conclusion
The question of the nature of
the linguistic skills which students will require for European citizenship
remains an open one. I believe that
students are most likely to fulfil their own goals of travelling widely and
enjoyably if they have the intercultural skills which will enable them to make
personal contacts with German speakers.
It is likely that the business world of the future will use English to
an increasing extent, as is already the case in a number of large German
companies, and this will mean that students’ ability to interact socially in
their leisure time will be far more important than their vocational,
workplace-related skills. Another
development which is already occurring is the resurgence of orality in hi-tech
communication: e-mails often have a ‘stream of consciousness’ form which brings
them far closer to the spoken than to the written word, and this intermediate
form is becoming a primary means of communication in many settings. If the age of privileged written
communication is on the decline, then at least one of the roles of the
university language course must be to prepare our students for the oral
comeback.
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Biodata
Sheila Watts hat am Trinity College Dublin
studiert, promoviert und 1990-1998 Deutsch und germanistische Linguistik
gelehrt. Seit 1998
arbeitet sie am Department of German, University of Cambridge. Ihre
Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen hauptsächlich in der Geschichte der deutschen
Sprache. 2001 erschien bei Niemeyer der von Watts, Jonathan West und
Hans-Joachim Solms herausgegebene Tagungsband Zur Verbmorphologie germanischer
Sprachen,. Eine Monographie über den Verbalaspekt im Altsächsischen ist in
Vorbereitung. Sheila Watts ist auch Autorin einiger Artikel im Themenbereich
DaF, wo es ihr vor allem um den Erwerb von interkultureller Kompetenz geht.
[1] A typical example of this
kind of progression is seen in the widely-used German series, Themen neu. In the first book of the
series, intended for beginners, about
two-thirds of each lesson is devoted to spoken dialogues, printed in full,
whereas in the third book, aimed at advanced learners, the proportion of space
devoted to speaking is reduced to about one third, with the associated printed
text consisting of questions and related tasks rather than a transcript of the
audio material (Aufderstraße et al. 1992 and 1998).
[2] I omit here the frequent
exercises in the oral description of pictures, a task prompted by its inclusion
in the Goethe Institut Zentrale
Mittelstufenprüfung. Such exercises are so obviously grammar and vocabulary
tests or simply exercises with no link to authentic speech that they need not
be discussed further here.
[3] Information on syllabuses in this section comes from the websites
listed at the end of the paper. Neither
the Scottish nor the Irish (Republic) sites consulted gave full information on
syllabus content in modern foreign languages.
[4] The survey was carried out using the e-mail list
german-studies@mailbase.ac.uk, which is sponsored by the Conference of
University Teachers of German in Great Britain and Ireland. 30 respondents were
from UK institutions, of which 24 were ‘old’ and 6 ‘new’ universities: 4
respondents were from institutions in the Republic of Ireland.
[5]This remark applies to discourse structure, lexis, syntax and, to
an extent morphology. It does not, of
course, apply to pronunciation, where the gap in English is very wide indeed.
[6] The extract is from a
transcription in Schwitalla (1997: 40-41): in the interests of simplicity,
word-stress and commentaries on non-verbal activity have been removed. The
symbols / and \ indicate rising and falling intonation respectively, and
underlined text indicates simultaneous speech.
Halliday argues that the use of transcripts like this is a “caricature”
of real speech, because in his view they make conversation look less structured
than it really is (1998: 100).