Pragmatic Pitfalls of Learning/Teaching German

Abstract

Contrastive Analysis (CA) in linguistics typically focuses on four levels of analysis: phonology, lexis, morphology and syntax.1 Over the past 40 years2 American foreign language (FL) teachers of German, Spanish, and Italian have obtained valuable new structuralist data from the University of Chicago series on phonology3 and morphology and syntax.4 A CA of semantics, i.e. the lexicon, was essentially left to the lexicographers, with cognates and false friends receiving only brief mention but no detailed analysis.5 The study of language usage or pragmatics has only recently been considered from a point of view.6 The time is right for examining the differences in usage between American English and standard German. By focusing on how English and German are used, some glaring semantic contrasts are revealed. Such a pragmatic (CP) analysis of German and American English raises long neglected questions about CA for semantics and pragmatics and also yields important new insights into cultural clash and the acquisition of a second language. CP should be especially helpful to teachers of German, teacher trainers, textbook authors, and advanced students of German as a foreign language. Teachers who can instill in their students a sensitivity for the culturally-bound linguistic contrasts between American English and standard German will be providing their students valuable cultural and linguistic information that transcends the classroom. An awareness of pragmatic contrasts should also assist textbook authors in their selection and presentation of textbook materials. Further, while the ability of CA to predict and reduce learner errors has been widely disputed,7 an awareness of CP, at the very least, alerts language learners to the existence of such pragmatic contrasts. Optimally, this awareness will motivate students and teachers alike to examine spoken English and German more carefully. This article does not advocate a contrastive to the exclusion of all others for teaching communication in an introductory German class. Other more successful and more economical methodologies already exist. However, for sensitizing students (and teachers) to the pragmatics of discourse as Kramsch suggests,8 comparison with a comparable L1 text helps expose the subtleties in usage that a monolingual approach may not always reveal. In this way Kramsch's two-step approach to teaching discourse pragmatics is retained and enhanced. Students are taught first to recognize pragmatic devices through observation and analysis of authentic texts, and then to produce these devices on their own through dialogues, role plays, and oral chaining techniques. Although this article primarily considers aspects of the spoken language and uses the term speaker throughout, the notion of pragmatics applies to written texts and writers just as well. Regardless of the medium one considers,