My favourite seminar this semester is Teaching German as a Second Language. Doing just that, teaching German to students who have just arrived in Germany from all over the world, is about the most challenging thing I can imagine, and what Ulla Jones, our teacher who also teaches German as a Second Language at a grammar school in Hamburg tells us the most interesting and the most shocking things about the students and the German government's educational policy.
Courses for German as a Second language have not been offered in schools that long. The German government realised only in the mid-eighties that the young, male workers who'd come over from Italy, then from Poland, and, increasingly, from Turkey would not, in fact go back, that lots of them had married and indeed had the curious notion that children might be a good idea.
In those days, compulsory attendance did not apply to the children of immigrants. Thus, there were loads of children born and raised in families with a German proficiency of various degrees of fossilization.
The families also had the strange notion of sending their children to school.
How utterly unforseeable!
Suddenly, the school had a new situation on their hands. Or rather, they didn't. Those students who did not speak the language were just put into the regular classes and did not receive any instructions in the langauge whatsoever. Immersion in it's truest form. Of course not very good for the students, but who cares. Back in my student days we had one or two people in my class who did not speak German, and they learned it within a year, from scratch. Their German was pretty good at the end of that, however.
Curiously, this trend continued, and suddenly there were classes with a great percentage of students who did not speak German as a first language. What to do, what to do... well, their problem, so, nothing. There were very early tentative beginnings to introduce learning German for those students into Germany's curriculi, but that was a painfully slow process that hasn't really progressed a lot during the last thirty years.
It has in Hamburg, because Ms Jones and associates would just go and introduce changes, like introductory classes with the main purpose of learning the language before being sent to the regular classes after reaching European proficiency level
B2 ("Independent user"). When there was a change in government and the new
Schulsenator would express his surprise at their practices they would just look at him with wide-eyed surprise,
"What do you mean? We've always done things this way!" - and be left alone.
What is shocking about this is that that back door was the only way of introducing changes, whenever they'd tried the regular way they'd been informed that there was neither the demand (!) nor the money for it.
It would also be easy if there was good material to rely on, but there is not. There are a few books, but they are all not that convincing, so you have to devise most of the material you use yourself.
It would be easy if most students in those classes would speak the same language or were roughly at the same level. This is not the case. Most groups are so absolutely diverse that there is little hope of simply going and learning the student's native language and thus being able to teach them better. Doesn't work like that at all. Ulla, our teacher, told us how she often ends up setting very different tasks, eg. having a group read a text and summarise it, having one listen to a CD and do a few exercises on comprehension, and another group copy out words to learn the alphabet. SO challenging! I'd
love that. It's language teaching to the extreme!
It would be easy if the authorities would even so much as acknowledge that students arriving who do not speak German are a problem. They don't. In most of our
Ländern, there are no programs that enable students to learn the language properly before they attend regular classes. Since the realisation dawned that this might become necessary and because they do it in Sweden there are tentative beginnings of proper integration, but that's still in very early stages in most
Ländern except for Bavaria, and, curiously, Hamburg (Yay!! For once!!), who are a few baby steps ahead.
In addition, most students who do arrive here do not because there parents woke up one morning and thought that it might be just a splendid idea to buy a cozy house in Germany and send their kids to school in this country while learning the language. They often come from rather dramatic backgrounds and do not appreciate the fact that they suddenly find themselves in a strange country where no one speaks their language at all.
"We have a lot of students whose young, Eastern European mothers came to Germany and married a much, much older man. Imagine your mother had moved to another country to marry someone who could be your grandfather. How highly motivated would you be to learn German?"
In Ulla's class, there are really people from all over the world (just imagine how interesting classes with these kids must be! Just imagine the Geography lessons!), and most of them did not want to come to Germany. Most of them did not really have a great childhood, most of them miss their homes, their friends, their families terribly. They are confused, lonely, and not exactly made to feel welcome. Everything theories suggest on language acquisition suggests that it is a miracle if these kids learn anything at all due to the "affective filter".
Some also experienced huge difficulties with actually leaving their country. She told us that she'd once talked to an ex-student who's now doing his German A-levels about a couple of young Russian students who'd just arrived.
"This is what I do not understand. They knew five years ahead. How early did you know?"
"Oh, maybe seven, eight years before we left?"
"But if you knew
eight years ago that you'd come to Germany, then
why didn't you learn German?"
"Because you have no clue at all, Ms Jones."
And they did know, but not all of the family members were really supposed to. The boy she talked to had merely overheard his parents making plans when he wasn't supposed to.
In his very rural part of Russia (I don't know where, exactly, sadly), people they'd known had made plans to leave. Their children were kidnapped and their money and property was stolen when word got out. The student's family was not keen on similar reactions.
So the parents did make plans, and sold their furniture one by one, and the house, and told everybody they'd move to the city, and then, two days before boarding the plane, the children were told to pack their suitcases and say goodbye to their grandmother and their cat, because they were leaving for Germany, for good. There was absolutely no question of going and learning German, it would be far too suspicious. The student and his family arrived in Germany in 2002.
And the unsupportive attitude of our government really makes me livid. Of course it's more or less everybody's own responsibility to learn a language, you can't force people to, but to learn they should be offered courses. Otherwise, HOW can you expect people to be able to speak the language?? Open University courses expensive, and most of our new arrivals aren't exactly rich.
A lot of students who do not speak the language properly are still being sent to the
Hauptschule (third of Germany's three secondary school forms, very low prestige, education with minimal requirements and a very low chance of employment after finishing, general public's attitude being "The school the stupid people go to") because teachers claim they have a language learning disability or a general sort of speech impediment. It's
not, it's no opportunity to learn the language properly and language fossilization.
They have introduced tests what, two years ago? that test if they do in their mother tongue. If they don't, they're being sent back to other school forms.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
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