Teaching German Grammar through Communicative Tasks: Some Suggestions

Abstract

Over the years teachers develop a repertoire of explanations which are rewarded by the students' Aha as they vocalize rule comprehension. Nonetheless, there seems to be a gap between students' initial rule comprehension and correct language production the following day, week, or month. Especially when students engage in free communication tasks, accuracy and rule knowledge seem miraculously to disappear, which makes one wonder what happened to the knowledge demonstrated in exercises just days earlier. Despite increased attention in the last two decades, the grammar dilemma for German programs persists. Second language acquisition research has introduced technical terms such as value, limited capacity processors, focus on form, and depth of processing, which give insight into the complexity of both the students' learning process (Ellis 40) and the teachers' endeavor. Effective teaching materials and language instruction need to incorporate these insights. But, as Tschirner (1998) observed, they have been slow to show up in mainstream text books and teacher education. Moreover, many of the current textbooks which provide tasks to integrate and language teaching principles neither cite the explicit research findings and theoretical assumptions underlying the tasks nor define terms such as proficiency-oriented, contextualized, and communicative language teaching.1 Since application of principles cannot be assumed to be selfevident, even the best text materials might not serve their intended purpose. Despite an abundance of work integrating current theory into beginning Spanish instruction (Lee and VanPatten; Leow; Rosa and O'Neill; VanPatten and Cardierno), French immersion programs, and higher-level classes of English as a second language (for a summary see Doughty and Williams), relatively few recent contributions do so for German.2