What is the ultimate goal of foreign-language teaching? According to the Berlin Senatsverwaltung, learners are to acquire the skills necessary to verbally interact in international contexts (2006. Rahmenlehrplan für die Grundschule und die Sekundarstufe I – Englisch). As Steven Wosniack explains in his paper "Cultural Literacy, Curricula und was Star Trek damit zu tun hat", this includes far more than grammatical competence, comprehensible pronunciation and a reasonably large vocabulary. Competent language users leave things unsaid; they allude to shared knowledge and expect their interlocutors to supply missing information in unfinished quotations or idioms. You just can’t be a successful member of the literate English speaking world if you’ve never heard of books like Moby Dick, TV series like Star Trek or people like Hilary Clinton or Jon Snow. If we want to be successful teachers of English, we need to enable and encourage our students to gain access to cultural literacy. Steven Wosniack shows us how this can be done using a Star Trek episode.
EdLing@fu
Educational Linguistics at Freie Universität