Published: 2022-02-09
Updated: 2022-03-22
We native English teachers all teach our mainly German clients how to use and improve some foreign language either at a VHS, or other adult training institute or even in-house at companies. And most of us have been in this “business” for several years and have experienced the one-or-other odd situation and maybe not known how to help the client or even understand why certain things just didn’t seem to sink in. I started to think and asked myself:
I started working at the Moosburg VHS in fall of 1991. At that time, they did not expect or require any kind of pedagogical training, and so, being the resident native speaker, I got the job, no further questions asked. Since then, we all have gone through a EUROLTA training program to comply with Germans’ love of and need for provable qualification, and I was one of the first to take part in the program to become certified here in Moosburg.
Do not misunderstand me; I loved the program for several reasons. It got me out of the house for the training weekends, and the workshops were lots of fun. They gave me insights into the why's and how's of teaching and working with adults. And, just as importantly, it gave me a sense of having achieved something when I was awarded the EUROLTA Certificate.
Professor Juliane House, of the University of Hamburg, has studied groups of people interacting in controlled situations, watching with academic rigor how they behave as human guineapigs.
She found (or verified) that Germans really don’t do small talk, those little phrases so familiar to the British about the weather or a person’s general well-being, but which she describes as “empty verbiage”.
While this might explain how many English speakers perceive Germans to be somewhat direct and abrupt (and perhaps might contribute to the stereotype of Germans as a very efficient people), it also highlights the importance of learning the culture of a language as well as the language itself. If you had learned German and had become fluent, yet still engaged in small talk with native German speakers, it would still mark you as something of an outsider.
Coming back to the question above – what exactly do we teach? We have to be aware of something that we were not taught in this or any other additional training program: language transports culture. This always plays a role in all attempts to assist and train our clients to communicate in a foreign language. We’ve all probably dealt with similar difficulties concerning differences of English and German grammar – how to heave your client from A2 to B1 level, trying to make them understand that memorizing grammar rules and memorizing oodles of vocabulary and rules on sentence structure, etc. does not make for correct use of English, right? Of course, it might also be helpful if you knew another foreign language, to make visible comparisons of grammar and structural differences.
Once learnt, not easily forgotten is the premise here. Add to that the amazingly resilient stubbornness of Bavarians, and you just cannot get rid of the incorrect use of, for instance, the present perfect in English. We’ve all heard it: “Ich bin gestern nach Landshut gefahren”. Your stomach cramps, your face goes blank, you bite your lower lip, and then you start to dig deep into your mental collection of exercises that might help…yet even after everyone remembers that, as soon as you use a time expression, you cannot use the present perfect in the English language, the very next time someone should be using simple past, they give you another version of the above and you begin to question your sanity.
It only took a short time for me to realize that there is a great language divide in Germany (hence my example from Bavaria) which I have placed at about the Main river. It seems to be the case that those north of this “border”, can use the present perfect correctly. And another bit of grammar nightmare, the use of the present progressive, is more easily and correctly used in those states where they say things like: “Ich bin am arbeiten”.
These are episodic examples of grammar issues, but what does this have to do with “What exactly we teach”? I must add a bit of personal history here. I had a revelation in attempting to answer that question after I had been to China where I taught English, as well as German to Chinese adults. By that time, I had collected 25+ years of EFL experience in Germany and was now confronted with other problematic language situations. I had to delve deep into Chinese culture, the history and development of the Chinese language — and how this extremely complex language is taught — to start to see through the fog of my own ignorance. I realized that one of the main aspects of language learning of Chinese was through the memorization of thousands of characters. That alone shows how quickly the parts of language can be learned and how much discipline it takes from an early age on to achieve that. Another huge difference between Chinese and any Latin-based language can be seen in the structure — Chinese needs context to be understood and is therefore ambiguous. In contrast, western languages are explicit: a chair is a chair is a chair. The manner of communication is also extremely indirect, which is a nightmare for westerners – for example, Germans – who need things to be clear, concise and logical. There’s nothing wrong with that, but most of the Asian world does not communicate that way.
Putting together insights I have gained from reading up on how our own culture influences how we interact with people from other cultures (as defined by Dutch trainer, Geerd Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory), using my knowledge of an ongoing study on using the nine dimensions of culture developed by the GLOBE Project, a global leadership project, and describing how these nine aspects of culture effect global business, I felt I had an answer.
We’ve probably all heard of the different ways to depict “culture” before – such as the iceberg model, the onion or layer model and the tree model. So, what does that mean for us as trainers of English? What does it mean for teachers of German to immigrants, refugees and people hoping to become German citizens? If you do not know about your own culture and about yourself as an individual from that culture, you will not communicate the new foreign culture or, consequently, the new language culture to your clients – you must be aware of what it is you are teaching.
By Helen A. Stoemmer
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