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Chapter 4

Learning (Foreign) Languages in Cultural Contexts—Historic and Current Developments
Vignette “The Dunera Boys”

The German Bauhaus artist, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack was interned as a World War II detainee in New South Wales. During his stay in a camp he produced a small woodcut, called “Tatura” (1941)1. It shows the rows of living quarters laid out in military precision. The internees go about their daily tasks in this new, strange, foreign land. The heat and strong Australian light can be seen by the sharp shadows cast by the gum tree across the central walkway.

The Dunera Boys

After the fall of France, the loss of the Low Countries and Italy's declaration of war, Britain stood alone against the spread of fascism and anxieties became acute. In what Winston Churchill later regretted as “a deplorable and regrettable mistake,” all Austrians and Germans, and many Italians, were suspected of being enemy agents, potentially helping to plan the invasion of Britain, and a decision was made to deport them. Canada agreed to take some of them and Australia others.

On 10 July 1940, 2,542 detainees, all classified as “enemy aliens,” were embarked aboard the HMT Dunera at Liverpool. They included 200 Italian and 251 German prisoners of war, as well as several dozen Nazi sympathizers, along with 2,036 anti-Nazis, most of them Jewish refugees.

The Dunera arrived in Sydney on 6 September 1940 and the detainees were taken to Hay, a camp in New South Wales. They set up and administered their own township with Hay currency and an unofficial “university.” Among the transportees on the Dunera—who came to be known as “The Dunera Boys”—were Franz Stampfl, later the athletics coach to the four-minute-mile runner Roger Bannister, Wolf Klaphake, the inventor of synthetic camphor, the tenor Erich Liffmann, composer Ray Martin (orchestra leader), artists Heinz Henghes, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack and Erwin Fabian.2

On arrival in Australia Hirschfeld Mack was put into the Internment Camp in Hay, then briefly at Orange, then to Tatura. Fortunately, Dr. James Darling, Headmaster at Geelong Grammar, Corio, heard that this distinguished teacher and artist was interned in Australia. Early in the next year (1941), following the intervention of Dr. Darling, Hirschfeld was released and appointed Art Master at Geelong Grammar where he taught until his retirement in 1957. Hirschfeld continued to paint, draw and lecture until his death on 7 January 1964 (see also chapter 7.8: Intertextuality).

Not all Dunera Boys were as lucky as Hirschfeld Mack and had to get used to being treated as prisoners-of-war, or even worse as inimical aliens. Among them was a group of Templers from Palestine who also were brought to New South Wales. Most of them decided, however, to stay in Australia after World War II and settled in Melbourne, where they built their own community, a retirement home—and bilingual schools in their vicinity to foster their native language of German. Started as primary schools in Bayswater South and West, these became successful institutions feeding into the state system and spreading modern teaching ideas of bilingualism, which became a mainstream part of modern foreign language teaching on the 5th continent.

4.1 Communicative Language Teaching and the Grammar Question

Recent trends in foreign language learning focus on the enhancement and upgrade of a Communicative Language Teaching approach (CLT) that has been implemented in both Anglo-American and European countries since the 1970s and is realized in the interaction between students and instructors both as the means and objectives of study.

The rise of CLT in the 1970s and early 1980s was partly in response to the lack of success with traditional language teaching methods and partly due to the increase in demand for language learning” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_language_teaching).

Thus, the emphasis of teaching foreign languages moved from the realm of traditional grammar and functional linguistic competence to a priority for communication in the target language. This can especially be seen in the changes which guide Teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) and where socio-cognitive paradigms were called upon to show that language can be learned through the process of social interaction rather than by relying on grammatical competence, making CLT the dominant technique in teaching any language (cf. ibid.). Ensuing approaches and replacements have since gone through turns to competence-based and cognitive-oriented approaches till the lately emerging strategy of Visible Learning (cf. John Hattie in chapter 5) and digital versions of language instruction, as outlined by De Florio-Hansen (2018).

Said to have originated from Britain in the 1960s, the CLT approach quickly spread in the Anglo-American realm and was also adopted in most European countries. Details of this process are documented elsewhere (e.g. Schumann: 2010 and Reinfried et al.: 2012) and highlight interaction as both the technique and objective for learning a language. At that time, it was seen as a response to the prominent method of language learning, the audio-lingual approach and it served as a replacement of situational language teaching, based on the structural view of language. In our context, it will be followed up by tracing developments connected to content-based teaching and related learning strategies, because CLT entails a task and content orientation, relating to the Bauhaus principle “form follows function”, in linguistic-methodological terms: “language follows content”.

As already mentioned, the recommendations of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) encourage language teachers to consider that

meaning needs to precede form [because] before looking at letters or characters, before looking for clues in grammatical forms or word order, before trying to figure out details, learners should search for overall meaning (ACTFL 2020: n.p.).

In relation to our ICM, the “grammar question” will be revisited in discussing the CLIL tools and skills (in chapter 8). It would suffice here to refer to a common ground of language practitioners that “grammar teaching still tends to favor form over meaning and neglects teaching English as it is spoken in actual use” (Grimm et al. 2015: 97). Other German linguists have confirmed that there is no automatic transfer from the knowledge of grammatical rules to the successful production of language (my translation of Thaler 2012: 237) and, in sum, that

grammar teaching clearly … constitutes an ill-defined domain: the role of formal instruction itself has been a perennial area of debate, and more than 20 years of research have failed to yield firm guidelines for grammar teaching methodology (Borg 1999: 157, cited in Timmis 2012: 119).

It is noteworthy, however, that in the wake of newer didactical discussions and inspired by changes triggered off by the digital media a renaissance of grammar teaching strategies begins to emerge, in this case with a focus on communicative-oriented priorities and related classroom practices. A special issue of Praxis Englisch (a professional magazine for English teachers in Germany) is titled “Grammar Matters” and argues that a consistent competence- and content-based teaching strategy entails rejection of straight-line progression of grammar, which is still the rule in conventional text-books. Notwithstanding, the connection of grammar and vocabulary is instrumental for students to access different aspects of linguistic domains. In this context authentic and age-adjusted texts need to be included in the learning process. Grammar texts, only drawn up to present a particular grammatical phenomenon do not include the necessary context to show the suitable communicative background (my translation of Praxis Englisch 2-2017: 6 f.; cf. Klewitz 2020: 59 f). Apparently, “disposing of an adequate vocabulary and appropriate grammatical structures as well as pragmatic knowledge and skills” (De Florio-Hansen 2018: 233) is a becoming combination to fulfill the objectives of CLT in language-based interaction.

Earlier versions of CLT go back to the pragma-linguistic research of Horst E. Piepho (1974) and Christoph Edelhoff in Germany in collaboration with Christopher Candlin; in this context the Australian scholar introduced four levels of meaning that influence speech acts: notional meaning referring to basic concepts of time, numbers, manner and place; logical or propositional meaning covering statements about the validity of particular events or situations; pragmatic-sociolinguistic meaning relating to affective functions to influence your interlocutor as in disagreeing, threatening, agreeing; discourse meaning connecting speech acts together in a sequence as the decisive level in any form of communicative acts. (cf. Klewitz 1977: 12)

Rejecting grammar-based teaching and arguing in favor of communicative teaching acts, these scholars suggested to replace traditional coursebook work with independent dossiers such as “issues” (Langenscheid 1976) and “European Studies” (Sheffield Polytechnic 1976/77) or the language kit “Kommunikativer Englischunterricht als Baukastenprinzip” (communicative language kit, ibid.). These prior projects were followed up and almost re-invented by a focus on effective and sustainable learning in interactive learning environments linking the students’ Zone of Proximal Development and respective Scaffolding. The connected teaching approach, based on best practice and quality instruction, relates to teachers finding ways to

 engage and motivate students

 teach appropriate strategies in the context of a particular curriculum domain (German: Sachfach-Curriculum)

 constantly seeking feedback about how effective their teaching is being with all their students.

This approach has been encompassed in Visible Teaching and related school networks operating predominantly in the Australian system, as presented in the following chapter (chapters 5.3 and 5.5).

4.2 The Common European Framework for Languages

Back in Europe, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF) has been in place since 2001 and replaced the European Threshhold Levels of the 1970s, which were inventories of linguistic forms required to master in order to reach a certain threshold of communication. In the 1990s the Council of Europe, in going beyond defining linguistic competences at certain stages of learning, followed the aim to make language acquisition and student competency transparent and comparable. As a result, the CEF was developed by examining partial skills like reading and listening comprehension, writing and speaking and six levels of competency were formulated in a global scales system:

A1: Starter

A2: Elementary

B1: Pre-intermediate

B1+: Intermediate

B2: Upper Intermediate

C1: Advanced

The CEF recommended that related language activities would be based on authentic texts and topical material (cf. CEF 2001: 142). At its core are “communicative language competences … which empower a person to act using specifically linguistic means” (ibid.: 9; original emphasis). As a guideline to describe achievements of learners of foreign languages, originally across Europe but increasingly adopted in other countries as well, it is by now an international standard for describing language ability. Communicative activities are realized in various sectors of social life, which the CEF calls educational, occupational, public and personal domains corresponding to particular registers.

The CEF itself does not prescribe any particular way to teach languages: “it is not the function of the Framework to promote one particular language teaching methodology, but instead to present options” (CEF 2001: 142), because it “cannot take up a position on one side or another of current theoretical disputes on the nature of language acquisition and its relation to language learning, nor should it embody any one particular approach to language teaching to the exclusion of all others” (ibid.: 18). It is, however, based on an “action-oriented approach”:

The approach adopted here, generally speaking, is an action-oriented one in so far as it views users and learners of a language primarily as ‘social agents’, i.e. members of society who have tasks (not exclusively language-related) to accomplish in a given set of circumstances, in a specific environment and within a particular field of action (ibid.: 9).

The emergence of the concept of communicative competence (CLT) initially also followed a vague methodology and was basically and at first a critical confrontation with Chomsky’s structuralist assumptions. In its German version, Piepho’s work was later influenced by Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and, together with Candlin, he was more interested in students’ successful communication rather than linguistic correctness, so that conveying content was deemed to be more important than avoiding mistakes. In this sense, the aforementioned modules, like Issues or Baukästen, tended to neglect formal language structure and grammatical aspects, which gave CLT a clear priority of subject matter with disregarding the importance, at first, of grammar teaching at all. CLT texts, material and hands-on exercises, however, did not renounce students’ awareness of their linguistic development and helped create authentic learning environments, if possible also outside the language classroom or, instead simulations at least. This was supported by including forms of co-operative learning, distinct project strategies, learning by teaching and bilingual programs, although it took several years before the latter approach gained momentum and the first CLIL programs could be started (cf. Reinfried: 19).

Along similar lines, the Council of Europe has promoted “an approach based on the communicative needs of learners and the use of materials and methods that will enable learners to satisfy these needs and which are appropriate to their characteristics as learners” (CEF 2001: 142). Students, according to the CEF, would also be engaged in “metacommunicative” tasks to communicate about carrying out these tasks, commonly called language awareness, and would contribute to task-selection, management and evaluation:

Classroom tasks, whether reflecting ‘real-life’ use or essentially ‘pedagogic’ in nature, are communicative to the extent that they require learners to comprehend, negotiate and express meaning in order to achieve a communicative goal. The emphasis in a communicative task is on successful task completion and consequently the primary focus is on meaning as learners realise their communicative intentions (ibid.: 158; my emphasis).

4.3 Rethinking Foreign Language Teaching

These tendencies to prioritize meaningful content and opening the language classroom for interactive communication, dealing with societal issues and real-life controversies, even including topics like climate change, third world problems such as child labor and exploitation and going as far as covering aspects of the holocaust (e.g. Anne Frank’s diary; see vignette “intertextuality” chapter 7) are meeting with growing criticism in parts of the teaching profession. A recent example was published in one of the leading German newspapers (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 09/17/2020) and the article’s author, a German language teacher, is concerned about the push back of language structure and grammatical correctness, which, from his point of view, is presently happening in many foreign language classrooms.

Under the title “Rethinking Foreign Language Teaching” (“Fremdsprachenunterricht neu denken”) he attacks the main tenets of CLT maintaining their utilitarian essence instead of contributing to a broader idea of education (“Bildung” in the German original). His review of the history of foreign language teaching (basically TEFL) starts with the end of World War II, when methods first leaning on behaviorism generated drills in the language lab and were later superseded by a communicative competence, originally devoted to linguistic correctness and orientated towards native-speaker models and cultural education. In the introduction of standard-based tuition and “cementing” language skills in the Common European Framework for Languages since 2003 and 2012 native speakers and learning accurate language structure were being pushed back, and the author strongly contradicts the assumption that correctness would happen more or less automatically if only learners were given room for creative linguistic activities.

A current plight in the teaching of foreign languages, especially the dominant CLT, is diagnosed and would be detectable in the limited amount of passive vocabulary competence, in English averaged at 1.800 words, in French 1.000 and with a steady lowering of examination requirements, ending in tasks verging on banality and disregarding correctness of expression and structure. This kind of competence—as epitomized in CLT—would not require any previous knowledge and independent thinking in problem-solving. Missing was an examination of the difficulties accrued in learning and teaching the target language via language resulting in a profound ignorance of the core business of a language instructor: Who is learning the target language in just a rudimentary way, would hardly be able to deal with higher order thinking skills and educational content. As it had been suggested that the linguistic aspect of language learning is of less importance, stammering in “Pidgin-English” was the order of the day.

Deploring the detrimental influence of Apps, YouTube and other digital offers competing with language teaching, the author surprisingly advocates the extension of bilingual programs which would enable students to express themselves more fluently and precisely and to handle complex issues rather than being limited to “experts in communication”. Instruction of advanced language levels would have to become more challenging again and curricula would need to be developed in cooperation with the university. This was the only way to enhance linguistic and deeper cultural knowledge to counteract the degeneration of neo-philology as in Great Britain and the US.

Apart from a one-sided, rather conservative-traditional perception, leading to the misrepresentation of the CLT reality in the language classroom at large, key features of CLT are rather being distorted here. To begin with, foreign language teaching and CLT, for that matter, have been subject to numerous changes in the last decades, leading from the audio-lingual method on to communicative and lately competence-based approaches, enriched by Visible Learning—a process ignored by the author of “Rethinking…”. True enough, in times of globalization and world-wide communication, proficient language instruction is more important than ever and needs to be effective and authentic. The question only is, in what direction does the foreign language classroom go and whether a re-invention of grammar-based teaching focusing on native-speaker like performance is the right way to pursue. Teaching to standards and the CEF especially do not represent merely utilitarian objectives but allow for aspiring comparable learning results and relevant feedback, telling learners where they are moving in their ZPD and what they need to do in order to move forward.

The Common European Framework enjoys a positive international reputation, is implemented beyond Europe and, for example, worldwide in the Goethe Institute language courses. It is also helpful in assessing student oral performance and provides achievement scales that make language skills and knowledge verifiable and, at the same time, give language students a transparent impression about where they are in their learning process and how they can move to their next aims. In this practical way the quality and range of linguistic skills and language awareness has not declined, but on the contrary led to effective and communicative language activities in clearly defined domains and at carefully graded levels, as expressed in the scales between A1 and C2, far away from the “Pidgin-English” reproach. Linguistic research has shown, however, that even a B2/C1 level is unlikely to be attained in a “normal” language classroom (cf. De Florio 2018: 106) and it would need extra language contact and the added value of bilingual programs to get anywhere near a native-like language command.

One of the main aims of CLT was to provide more room for using the target language creatively instead of studying language as a system. The aforementioned ACTFL provides a convincing “Bicycle metaphor” to illustrate this truism:

Second Language Acquisition research has shown that learners need as much exposure as possible to the target language for acquisition to occur. Learners need to be actively engaged with the target language. Just like riding a bike or any other important skill, learning is best achieved by doing. For many learners, the precious minutes in our classrooms are the only opportunity in their day to experience the target language. We must maximize this exposure by providing a language-rich environment that prepares them for success in the real world. Likewise, if the goal is for learners to have the proficiency to survive and thrive in the target culture, whether it be in our neighborhoods or across the ocean, then authentic target language experiences must be provided (ACTFL: n.p.).

At the core of CLT was and is the idea of communication as a form of social acting—in the words of Vygotsky: students acquire language through meaning making with others (cf. ibid.) and develop their language skills in their ZPD, relying on appropriate Scaffolding provided by the instructor or more knowledgeable peers (chapter 6). They would act according to societal expectations (of the target culture, if applicable) and, as part of their speech acts, also negotiate meaning in a meta-communicative sense. Therefore, CLT is based on two key concepts: communicative activities and discourse competence (negotiation of meaning). Beyond mutual understanding students need to have a principle comprehension of communicative processes. According to Legutke (1988), there are five building blocks effective in a CLT classroom:

 focus on content, more important than grammatical correctness;

 authentic or simulated communicative situations, as in roleplays, projects, task-based activities or scenarios;

 flexible teaching material, in addition to text or course books;

 classroom formats supporting dialogue and avoiding teacher-centered instruction;

 extra-mural studies, opening the classroom for outdoor activities for living language links, encounters with peers in exchange programs to the target countries (adapted from Schumann: 140).