Do language teachers have to be political?

They are not, of course, supposed to promote the views of political parties or indoctrinate their pupils. Education systems, however, are never independent of politics. Thus, in the Berlin curriculum document, we read that the ultimate goal of secondary education is for learners to "take responsibility for themselves and others, to promote the equality of all human beings, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, language, nationality, disabilities, religious or political views, sexual orientation or socio-economic standing" (Rahmenlehrplan Sek I & II 2006: 5, my translation). Clearly, the motivation behind this is to promote democracy and a liberal society. If teachers are to teach social responsibility, it goes without saying that they need to be responsible members of society themselves.

(1) Somebody’s left… purse.
      [ ] his
      [ ] her
      [ ] their

The issue of politically correct and gender-neutral language lies at the interface between teaching language and teaching social responsibility, and it shows nicely that we cannot not take a position without ceasing to speak at all. Where do Germany’s educational authorities stand? Delaja Harder looks at singular they in German textbooks.

Delaja Harder. 2016. "Gendered Language in the EFL classroom. Singular They in German Textbooks and the Berlin Curriculum". Seminar Paper, FU Berlin.

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.

Wosniack 2106. Cultural Literacy, Curricula und was Star Trek damit zu tun hat. Seminar paper, Freie Universität Berlin, 2016.

Dear all,
An educational-linguistics co-project of FU, HU and TU will be presenting its results next year. Here’s an invitation to the event:

Tagung Neue Perspektiven für die Lehrkräftebildung:
Ergebnisse aus dem Projekt Sprachen-Bilden-Chancen

6. und 7. April 2017
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
im kommenden Jahr endet das Projekt „Sprachen-Bilden-Chancen: Innovationen für das Berliner Lehramt“. In dem gemeinsamen Projekt der Freien Universität, der Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin und der Technischen Universität wird seit 2014 die Lehrkräftebildung in den Bereichen Sprachbildung, Sprachförderung und Deutsch als Zweitsprache untersucht, überarbeitet und verbessert.
Zum Abschluss des Projekts möchten wir am 6. und 7. April 2017 der Öffentlichkeit die Ergebnisse präsentieren und gemeinsam mit Vertreterinnen und Vertretern aus Universität, Bildungspolitik, Vorbereitungsdienst, Lehrkräftefortbildung und Schule neue Perspektiven für die Lehrkräftebildung diskutieren.
Gerne möchten wir Sie schon jetzt herzlich zu der Tagung einladen und würden uns freuen, wenn Sie sich den Termin vormerken. Ein detailliertes Programm der Veranstaltung und Hinweise für die Anmeldung folgen im Herbst 2016. Bitte leiten Sie diesen Hinweis gern auch andere Interessierte weiter.
Das Projekt wird durch das Mercator-Institut für Sprachförderung und Deutsch als Zweitsprache gefördert. Mehr Informationen zum Projekt finden Sie hier: www.sprachen-bilden-chancen.de

Über Ihr Interesse freuen sich im Namen des gesamten Projektteams
Prof. Dr. Beate Lütke & Prof. Dr. Kämper-van den Boogaart

Here’s another event I’d like to alert you to:

Die Länderarbeitsgemeinschaft der Hochschullektor/innen Berlin Brandenburg
(mit freundlicher Unterstützung des Sprachenzentrums der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
lädt ein zum:
2. Tag der Fremdsprachenprüfung Berlin-Brandenburg
Er findet am Samstag, den 28. Mai im Sprachenzentrum der HU Berlin (Dorotheenstrasse 65) statt.
Thema: Die Bewertung der mündlichen Leistung im Unterricht sowie in Prüfungen

If you’ve been feeling dissatisfied with the way oral production is being assessed, or unsure about how you’re going to do this yourselves, this should be the place to work on solutions. 🙂

I’d like to draw your attention to an upcoming conference on the interface between teaching and linguistics hosted by the Institute of Pedagogy of the University of Gdańsk: https://www.educationalroleoflanguage.ug.edu.pl/communiqué. The deadline’s already expired, and many of you will probably be too busy to go anyway, but it’s nice to see that others are working on bridging the research gap in foreign languge teaching as well. Let’s hope there’ll be proceedings for us to read afterwards. 🙂

And let me encourage your to consider becoming conference-goers a bit later on in your careers. It never hurts to spend some time with international colleagues and see how things are done elsewhere.

A popular myth that has surfaced in both of my seminars on Educational Linguistics is that German teachers are no longer allowed to teach grammar. This is, of course, nonsense — what do we need language teachers for if not to teach us the structure of language? However, as with all myths, it has a basis in fact: in line with the general policy shift from a focus on form towards a focus on function, the current RLP assigns linguistic structures only a ’supporting function‘, secondary to the primary aim of creating ‚functional communicative competence‘. This has been taken to imply that lessons devoted entirely to grammar are now disallowed, which will make any linguist smile (or weep) who does not believe in the difference between grammar and communicative competence. Teaching language is teaching structure.

Irena Reinhardt disentangles the matter for us, surveying the changeing role alloted to (explicit) grammar instruction in the classroom and investigating suggestions made in recent curriculum-related publications by German authorities.

Reinhardt, Irena. 2016. "The Role of Grammar Instruction in the EFL Classroom". Seminar paper, FU Berlin.

I’m very grateful to Simone Luttert for being the first to volunteer her paper. She addresses the difficulty of assessing learners‘ oral language production in an objective and principled way, proposing an evaluative grid that is to help teachers put the RLP’s desideratum of basing assessment primarily on communicative success into practice.

Luttert, Simone. 2016. „Sprechprüfungen im Englischunterricht. Vorschlag für ein verlässliches und handliches Bewertungsmittel“. Seminar paper, FU Berlin.