The Benefits of Associative Activities for Writing in German as a Foreign Language: Some Preliminary Findings

Abstract

The issue of communicative and creative FL teaching, where understanding and self-expression in the classroom are equally stressed, has long occupied linguists, methodologists, and materials writers.2 Despite approaches to FL teaching that encourage the spontaneous use of language in the classroom in order to understand messages in the FL,3 studying a FL too often still means memorization and application of grammatical rules and the exceptions to these rules (even in the spoken medium).4 Even eclectic approaches to FL teaching, though combining the most successful characteristics of existing methods, often have not succeeded in presenting the language material in a creative way,5 but have continued to stress learning to read through translation and grammatical exercises. Such failures suggest that successful FL teaching does not result from synthesis alone,6 but rather from achieving a closer rapprochement between classroom instruction and the acquisition of FL. Most FL learning takes place in the classroom, but the goal of learning a FL is presumably to use it in real life situations. Therefore, it is my thesis that we must transform the classical distinction between spoken and written language into an alliance between the two.7 It is important to stress the common rather than the distinctive features of oral and written language within the same discourse mode (e.g., narration, argumentation etc.).8 Furthermore, we must involve the student not only intellec-