Berlin: A Model for the Teaching of Contemporary German Culture

Abstract

Berlin's history reveals the most fascinating and complex aspects of both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. The political status of Berlin is only one part of the urban dynamics of the city. Although it poses particular problems for economic development and city planning in the West, it has given rise to an energetic cultural scene. Both halves of the divided city are celebrating Berlin's 750th anniversary in 1987, and West Berlin will continue the festivities in 1988 by proclaiming itself a European Cultural Capital. These coming festivities alone are reason enough to make Berlin the subject of German language and culture courses. The interaction between Berlin's inhabitants and their environment furthermore provides a microcosmic view of life in Germany. The ways people appropriate and are manipulated by their surroundings in Berlin today can make for engrossing discussions in German class as well as in an English language culture course. We have organized three courses on Berlin at Washington University in St. Louis which take advantage of these learning opportunities. In this article we shall describe the goals, procedure, materials and results of the first two courses: 1) a conversation class for speakers of German and 2) a lecture-discussion class for speakers of English. We team-taught these courses Spring 1986 as well as the third course, a study trip to West Berlin in August 1986.1 The Conversation Course on Berlin was geared to third-year college level German language learning. Our goals were for students to improve their listening comprehension of German spoken by native speakers at a natural speed, to develop skills for helping each other get the information they needed to understand taped listening passages, to develop their own impression of German culture seen through the prism of West Berlin and to express it with increasing grammatical correctness. Students listened to a three to five minute interview with residents of Berlin during two weekly one-hour sessions over fifteen weeks. New or difficult vocabulary and idioms were introduced with hand-outs before students listened to the tapes. They were asked to brainstorm in German together on the meaning of new vocabulary. We corrected their interpretations and asked them to use the new words in a sentence before we went on. Students then listened to the whole interview before deciphering it sentence by sentence. At times, students found it helpful to reconstitute difficult sentences in writing. Structures which are foreign to them were drilled in subsequent lessons by setting up role-play exercises which would cause them to use the structures within a communicative context. The process of understanding the language led students to ask questions which called on us to describe the cultural significance of the interviews. Vocabulary learning