German Language Classroom Research Articles

Contextualizing DEIA in the German language classroom: Terminology and history, DDGC and recent developments, and practices and resources

AbstractThis paper takes a closer look at diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in the context of German Studies and the language classroom in the United States. The first part of the article examines the terminology, provides a general history of DEI/DEIA in higher education in the United States, and traces the development of DEI practices and language to include accessibility, belonging, and anti‐racism. The second part of the article focuses on the scholarly collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum and its self‐reflective and self‐critical stance toward our field, solidarity efforts to create networks of tangible support and empowerment, and its foregrounding of activism. This leads to a discussion of the intersections between current political events and classroom practices. Finally, the last section details three DEIA practices in the classroom—positionality, social justice framework, and antiracism—as well as resources for their implementation. It also points to new promising developments, for example, new outcomes and assessments for the language and culture classroom and pedagogy of care.

The Importance of Teaching Culture in German as an International Language Classroom in Malaysia

This study aims to explore teachers’ perceptions of the importance of culture in teaching German as an international language in secondary schools in Malaysia based on the interrelationship between language and culture which are closely related. The quantitative method through questionnaires was conducted to collect data. A total of 66 Malaysian secondary school German teachers were involved in this study. The results show that teachers agreed on the involvement of German culture in the German language curriculum. They are generally aware of the importance of teaching and integrating culture in the foreign language classroom and they often conducted cultural language activities in their teaching practice. Based on the results, some implications are obtained from the study on the importance of integrating culture in the German language classroom and recommendations are made for future studies.

Using innovative and pedagogical technologies in German language classrooms

Using innovative and pedagogical technologies in German language classrooms

Teaching Fairy Tales: Constructing Culture and Learning Language

Fairy tales often occupy only a superficial role in German language classrooms, used to check a culture box and teach the simple past tense. However, teaching fairy tales can engage students’ analytical faculties and expose them to the culturally and linguistically embedded nature of folktales, leading them to a deeper appreciation of language, culture, and history. This article examines a course titled “Fairy Tales and German National Identity,” and discusses ways to incorporate fairy tales into a course focused on German and intercultural literacy. Instructors can assist in developing students’ critical thinking and writing abilities by highlighting the deep connections between language, culture, politics, and history as well as cross‐cultural awareness. Students apply cross‐ and intercultural lenses to the study of excerpts from Goethe's Das Märchen, a selection of Grimm tales (especially those that fall out of or were added to subsequent editions), Heine's Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, and other secondary and student‐selected readings. Students learn to contextualize the tales within discreet German and contemporary political and historical frameworks through discussion, writing, and lectures. They may also adopt a new perspective on how high and low cultural artifacts influence social, cultural, and political attitudes.

Code switching as a communication strategy of German language students in Ho Chi Minh City – The case of German classes at USSH, VNU-HCM

The phenomenon of code switching – the use of multiple language varieties in a conversation (Myers-Scotton, 2006) – has been widely researched and discussed in the fields of linguistics and education. In foreign language classes, how languages are used by teachers and learners shows not only the applied teaching methods but also creates classroom discourse. However, even in classrooms where the target language is allowed, all participants occasionally code switch for multiple purposes. In many recent researches, this mixing of language is considered to be a communication tool; there are arguments that language mixing can even facilitate the learner in second language acquisition. In this paper, we gathered data from German language classrooms at intermediate level in Ho Chi Minh City, in which learners interchangably used both Vietnamese and German. We considered these classrooms to be a community of practice and we used conversation analysis as research framework to look at the functions of the learners' code switching in order to gain insight into language application from this target group in particular and multilinguals in general. Therefore, we suggest an approach in which the foreign language learners are viewed as multilingual individuals, and foreign language teaching should be based on this target group.

Paternalistic benevolence – Enabling violence

The transnational empirical project zooms in on ‘German language classrooms’ and the teachers’ task of dealing with the double bind between ‘the need to teach the German language for the empowerment of the learners’ on the one hand and the consequent ‘reproduction of the hegemonic norm of a monolingual society’ on the other. The teachers in the focus of the project work for institutes of adult education with learners who are migrants and refugees living in Germany or Austria. The results show how teachers frame their work through two central positions. The first can be framed as ‘paternalistic benevolence’and the second as ‘enabling violence’. The latter corresponds to a critical stance reflecting on the harm done in learning spaces while still being inevitable in nation states that construct themselves as monolingual unities. Pedagogical professionals looking for a responsible path that reduces the violence done to a minimum will discover interesting reflections on the possibilities of how to find an always uncertain and contradictory place in the interstices.

Landeskunde: its role and functions in the Irish German-language classroom

Landeskunde: its role and functions in the Irish German-language classroom

Cultivating Critical Listening: Hörspiele in the German Classroom

This article examines how the radio drama, or Hörspiel, might be successfully implemented in the German classroom to train students’ ability to listen for context. Hörspiele can help students reduce their dependency on visual stimuli, develop critical and discerning listening skills, and acquire familiarity with a lesser‐known literary genre and its historical and cultural context. Offering a sample five‐day unit modeled on Heinrich Böll's radio play, Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen, this article outlines three ways that this Hörspiel can be used in the German language classroom with intermediate‐ to advanced‐level language learners: (1) to develop students’ ability to listen for context through an acoustic literary genre, (2) to reinforce and contextualize grammar concepts such as case and noun declension, and (3) to introduce postwar German culture and the concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The unit's overall aim is to teach students to think critically about how contextual clues such as the quality of voices, background noises, and other acoustic elements help convey meaning. At the conclusion of the unit, students demonstrate their knowledge of the genre and its acoustic markers by creating their own original Hörspiel or radio play adaptation of a short story.

Berlin 2.0 in the German Language Classroom: Revisiting the 21st‐Century City by Discussing Gentrification

A short review of first‐ and second‐year German instructional material in the U.S. shows that, by design, cultural competence is either frequently conveyed in isolation from other language skills, or culture topics are approached merely in a utilitarian way to test comprehension or practice grammar. The contribution at hand presents a multi‐modal, documentary‐based lesson design on gentrification in Berlin. Students are encouraged to creatively employ their language skills to asses, interpret, and respond to information conveyed in the documentary film and develop intercultural empathy for a contemporary social justice issue in Germany.

A study of Chinese University learners’ anxiety in German language classrooms in at-home and study-abroad contexts

This study examined Chinese university learners’ anxiety in German language classrooms in at-home and study-abroad contexts. About 138 learners from a university in Beijing (at-home context) and 91...

German through Transcultural Lenses: A Study of Symbolic Competence in a University German-Language Classroom

German through Transcultural Lenses: A Study of Symbolic Competence in a University German-Language Classroom

Reading Johanna Spyri's Heidi in the Beginning German Language Classroom

The article explores the benefits of extensive reading in the beginning German language classroom. Employing a simplified version of Johanna Spyri's novel Heidi, the article brings together research on extensive reading and cultural literacy in a unit dedicated to the incorporation of Switzerland into the German language curriculum. The novel is used as a companion piece to the introductory textbooks common at the beginning level and helps develop linguistic skills at that level. Assigning Heidi as part of the German literary canon allows instructors to explore universal themes that align well with the AP curriculum, introduce beginning students to linguistic diversity in the German‐speaking areas of Europe, teach literary analysis, and provide students with a pleasurable extended reading experience.

… but you are not German.” – Afro‐German culture and literature in the German language classroom

Units and classes dedicated to multiculturalism in Germany have predominantly focused on Turkish‐German literature and culture. Afro‐Germans have been a minority whose culture and literature have only marginally been included in German classes, even though Afro‐Germans have been a part of Germany for centuries and have undergone efforts at establishing themselves as an organized cultural group. This article argues for a stronger focus on Afro‐German culture in German classes by providing a brief overview of Afro‐German history, outlining a sample class unit on Afro‐German poetry, and introducing an extensive list of Afro‐German texts and texts about Afro‐Germans in Germany that can be used at different levels of German. The article offers relevant background information for instructors interested in including units on the Afro‐German experience in their classes and suggests texts in a variety of genres for all language levels.

“weil – das ist eben doch richtig so” Teaching variant types of weil‐ and obwohl‐structures in German

Researchers have observed that in spoken German, the conjunctions weil and obwohl commonly occur with verb‐second (V2) instead of verb‐final (Vf) word order (Gaumann, ; Gänthner, , ; Uhmann, ). Current findings document that this syntactic variant of weil/obwohl‐structures has an alternative interactional meaning and function, namely expressing different causalities (Vandergriff, ). Based on the results of interactional linguistic research, we will outline why it is important for foreign language learners of German to be aware of the weil/obwohl+V2 structure. This background provides the basis for step‐by‐step teaching units on variant weil/obwohl‐clauses in the beginning and intermediate German language classroom. The suggested teaching units employ the five phases for teaching and learning pragmatics suggested by Barraja‐Rohan (). The aim is to raise learners’ awareness and understanding for this syntactic phenomenon and its interactional use in spoken German.

Teacher vs. Peer Oral Corrective Feedback in the German Language Classroom

AbstractThis classroom study investigated the effects of oral teacher and peer corrective feedback on the acquisition of the German present perfect tense, including auxiliary verb selection (a rule‐based structure) and past participle formation (an item‐based structure). Intermediate learners of German were assigned to a teacher feedback condition, a peer feedback condition, or a control group. Learners in the teacher feedback group were corrected by their course instructor, while learners in the peer feedback group were trained to provide guidance to each other at the beginning of a two‐day instructional treatment. Results from both an immediate and delayed posttest showed that while both experimental groups significantly improved in grammatical accuracy with both auxiliary selection and the past participle, the largest improvement was seen among the learners in the peer feedback group. These findings suggest that peer corrective feedback heightens learners' awareness of linguistic forms and that learners who provide such feedback may benefit not only from receiving but also from providing it. The results further demonstrate that peer feedback can be effective with less‐proficient learners and with different types of grammatical structures.

Teaching Pronunciation in Just Ten Minutes a Day: A Method for Pronunciation Instruction in First‐Semester German Language Classrooms

Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching GermanVolume 48, Issue 1 p. 59-83 Articles Teaching Pronunciation in Just Ten Minutes a Day: A Method for Pronunciation Instruction in First-Semester German Language Classrooms Ashley Roccamo, Ashley Roccamo University of Southern CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author Ashley Roccamo, Ashley Roccamo University of Southern CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 May 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.10181Citations: 3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume48, Issue1Spring 2015Pages 59-83 RelatedInformation

“Tags are easy, ne?”: How to Teach the Use of Tags in the German Language Classroom

“Tags are easy, <i>ne?</i>”: How to Teach the Use of Tags in the German Language Classroom

The policy and practice of teacher target language use in post-primary foreign language classrooms in Ireland

The theory and practice of language education are not always aligned. Best practice as described in the literature and prescribed in policy does not necessarily make it into the classroom. This paper discusses one aspect of language teaching, classroom target language use, and investigates the relationship between policy and practice in post-primary German language classrooms in Ireland. The study uses a mixed methods approach to empirically investigate the use of the target language as prescribed by policy makers, reported by teachers and observed in the classroom. First, relevant documents including the German syllabus and school inspection reports were analysed and semi-structured interviews were conducted with German teacher trainers. Secondly, a questionnaire regarding teacher language use was sent to all schools in Ireland where German is taught and was distributed at events of the German Teachers’ Association of Ireland (GDI). Thirdly, 19 German classes given by six different teachers were observed, recorded, transcribed and analysed for target language use. The results of this study highlight some discrepancies between the prescribed, self-reported and observed use of the target language in second level German classes and it is suggested that the lack of a consistent guidelines for teachers results in lower level of target language use.

Beyond Grammar: Teaching Interaction in the German Language Classroom

Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching GermanVolume 47, Issue 2 p. 140-163 Articles Beyond Grammar: Teaching Interaction in the German Language Classroom Emma M. Betz, Emma M. Betz University of WaterlooSearch for more papers by this authorThorsten Huth, Thorsten Huth University of TennesseeSearch for more papers by this author Emma M. Betz, Emma M. Betz University of WaterlooSearch for more papers by this authorThorsten Huth, Thorsten Huth University of TennesseeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 November 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.10167Citations: 30Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume47, Issue2Fall 2014Pages 140-163 RelatedInformation

From Broadway to Berlin: Transformative Learning through German Hip‐Hop

AbstractThis article explores the possibilities for effecting Transformative Learning in students of German language and culture through the use of popular music videos, in both the target and the students’ own languages. Transformative Learning, a term that has differing valences in numerous academic disciplines, is employed here in its social‐scientific context to denote the ability of learners to negotiate successfully between different cultural frames of reference in order to understand their experiences of cultural dissonance (Anderson &amp; Cunningham, 2010). While Transformative Learning is indeed a higher order cognitive goal, the author argues here that the German language classroom can be an ideal location for building the skills (reflection, interpretation, acquisition of concepts and nuanced self understanding) that set the stage for Transformative Learning to take place over time. The author first lays the theoretical groundwork for this type of learning, followed by a brief introduction to the concept of transculturation (Pratt, 2005) as an important framework for understanding developments in German hip‐hop musical and visual styles from the early 1990s to the present. The article includes an in‐depth comparison of music videos from Germany and the United States.