Munich works: German perspectives on the history of language learning and teaching

ABSTRACT

Most German research in the field of the history of Foreign language education (termed Fremdsprachendidaktik there) has been done by Munich based scholars and published in the Münchener Arbeiten zur Fremdsprachen-Forschung edited by Friederike Klippel. This paper reviews the four Ph.D. theses and two anthologies published since 2012 collectively and thus shows the German perspectives on the history of foreign language education. It also gives suggestions of aspects in which the field might develop historiographically.

KEYWORDS:

• Fremdsprachendidaktik
• Ph.D. theses
• Germany
• history of language learning and teaching

Inquiry into the history of language learning and teaching still is a widely neglected area within the discipline of Foreign Language Education/Fachdidaktik in Germany. One of the few exceptions is the Ph.D. theses Friederike Klippel supervised during her time at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. My review will provide a closer look at four of those ‘Munich works’ that were published between 2012 and 2015, namely Christiane Ostermeier’s (2012) Die Sprachenfolge an den höheren Schulen in Preußen (1859–1931). Ein historischer Diskurs, Elisabeth Kolb’s (2013) Kultur im Englischunterricht. Deutschland, Frankreich und Schweden im Vergleich (1975–2011), Dorottya Ruisz’s (2014) Umerziehung durch Englischunterricht? US-amerikanische Reeducation-Politik, neuphilologische Orientierungsdebatte und bildungspolitische Umsetzung im nachkriegszeitlichen Bayern (1945–1955), and finally Marlis Schleich’s (2015) Geschichte Des internationalen Schülerbriefwechsels. Entstehung und Entwicklung im historischen Kontext von den Anfängen bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. The four studies cover the larger part of the last 200 years of public schooling and focus on two major German states (Prussia and Bavaria), taking into account a European perspective (Germany, France, Great Britain, Sweden) and several modern foreign languages and their learning and teaching.

Ostermeier (2012) investigates the sequence of languages taught at nineteenth-century Prussian schools, focusing on the reasons and justifications for teaching English, French, and Spanish as well as Latin or Greek in different educational settings. Her study covers the sovereign state of Prussia since the integration of English into the curricula in 1859, Prussia as part of the German Reich and the Weimar Republic. The main source material used are the compulsory school programmes (Schulprogramme) and the articles therein, as well as the pedagogical journals that were developing in the late nineteenth century. Ostermeier’s study reveals that the rationale behind the sequence of languages can only be fully understood if a more general history of ideas is taken into consideration – mainly the specific German struggle between the utilitarian quality of (usually) modern foreign languages for an industrialised state and a neo-humanist concept of Bildung in a Humboldtian sense that favoured the classics.

Marlis Schleich inquires in the record of correspondence between school pupils and their international pen-pals that was established as part of school language education before the First World War. In order to capture the motivations behind these letters written by German, French and British pupils, she also examines articles from German school programmes; her main source material is journals from the three countries, namely Die Neueren Sprachen, Revue Universitaire, and Review of Reviews. A distinctive element of her thesis preceding the explicit focus on pen-pal correspondence itself is a broad description of contextual features that surrounded the growing intercultural exchange including transport and postal history, the development of secondary education and internationalisation, as well as peace movements. Against this backdrop, Schleich shows how pen-friendships and their authentic communication affected the development of ‘communicative’ modern language teaching. This extraordinary perspective led to Schleich’s thesis being named the first historiographic work ever to be awarded the German Eberhard-Piepho-Prize for ideas in communicative language teaching.

Jumping a few decades ahead, Ruisz analyses the role of English language teaching in and for US re-education policies in Bavaria after the Second World War. Her work encompasses the intersection of politics, scholarship and schooling. In contrast to the works focusing on the nineteenth century, she can fall back onto a multitude of sources and references – especially on the policy level. Remarkably, since very few US sources deal specifically with English language teaching and its importance for re-educating Germans or Bavarians, journals in the area of modern language education yet again prove fundamental for the study. A central observation is that within the discourse of schooling and language teaching there is a remarkable continuity on the level of the opinion makers and their ideas. Although partly re-contextualised and reconciled with re-education goals (such as international understanding and reintegrating Western Germany into the ranks of western civilisation), Neo-humanism retained its highly influential status from before (and partly throughout) the Third Reich. Viewed from the perspective of the Nazi dictatorship and its horrors, such a fundamental stability of ideas about schooling and language teaching may sound puzzling at first. Yet this notion is well in line with Tyack & Cuban (1995) ‘grammar of schooling’ or Bloemert, Jansen, & van de Grift (2016) ‘curricular heritage’.

Elisabeth Kolb moves into recent history by looking at the role of culture in English language education. She does so by comparing a vast corpus of curricula in three European countries – Germany, France and Sweden – between 1975 and 2011. She traces all sorts of cultural content mentioned therein and aims to analyse tendencies of development and persistence in a diachronic and synchronic way. It would be impossible to illustrate the multitude of insights gained from closely looking at three different teaching traditions here. What is striking, however, is that the way schools in three European states deal with cultural elements in language teaching reveals a lot more about the nations and their curricular heritage themselves than about their view of the target cultures: In Germany, cultural topics traditionally play(ed) a central role. Teaching them shifted from applied geography (Landeskunde) to intercultural learning. In contrast, French foreign language classrooms traditionally focussed on literary texts; cultural content served to interpret those artefacts of civilisation. In Sweden, functional goals in a ‘marketplace tradition’ were in the foreground and therefore cultural content traditionally played a minor role.

A comparative look at these four ‘Munich works’ shows a clear scientific approach. Discourses about different aspects of language learning and teaching as well as the histories of ideas are addressed in a methodologically controlled manner, based on clearly defined theoretical foundations and circulating around precisely formulated research questions. All these are qualities that have not always been central to histories of school subjects and teaching – especially not in a field that widely neglects its own past. Looking at the four works from the scholarly angle of general historical works, the astonishingly explicit methodological chapters might even sound a bit defensive in their quest to justify bringing plain instruments of historical research to a discipline obsessed with methodological questions after the ‘empirical (over)turn’ foreign language education has experienced in the last few decades. Eight to 20 pages are devoted in each of the theses to explaining what is characterised as discourse analysis according to the ‘Cambridge School’ of Pocock and Skinner. Generally, all four theses share a common framework of analysis (presumably) developed in a Munich doctoral colloquium. In a manner that could be seen as appropriate for analysing different types of historical sources, discourse analysis might be more of an attitude than an instrument for approaching them. In essence, this approach probably resembles the practice of careful heuristic and context-sensitive source analysis. One reason to argue for the pertinence of discursive analysis might be the need of historiography to be taken seriously amongst other empirical works in foreign language education/Fremdsprachendidaktik.

Nevertheless, all four theses add another very interesting and valuable tile to the mosaic of the history of language teaching and learning. Still we find that to this day this is only fragmentary, and we cannot really see the big picture beyond what Howatt & Smith (2012: 76) call ‘potted histories’. A possible next step might be to do more sourcework and thus to add more perspectives to the mosaic. For the mainly German context, two Munich anthologies edited by Klippel, Kolb, & Sharp (2013) and by Eder & Klippel (2017) collect a multitude of papers presented at the history sections of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Fremdsprachenforschung (DGFF). In Schulsprachenpolitik und fremdprachliche Unterrichtspraxis. Historische Schlaglichter zwischen 1800 und 1989 (2013), there are 10 papers on language policy and language teaching practice – including papers by the four scholars covering aspects of the theses discussed here. Sprachenpolitik im Kontext gesellschaftlicher und politischer Ereignisse und Entwicklungen. Historische Vignetten (2017) presents 11 papers including contributions by Schleich and Ruisz. Sadly, within the DGFF Klippel does not seem to have found a successor who would like to carry the baton of historical research in the field language education: The last two biennial DGFF-congresses have hosted no history sections or panels.

Moving ahead from the Munich works, the quest to complete the mosaic also calls for more theoretical work done in the field of the history of language teaching and learning. The more general historiography of education (not of specific school subjects) might offer theoretical approaches worth applying to and testing in the field of language education – e.g. the notion of grammar of schooling or curricular heritage mentioned above. Without sound historical knowledge of our own field – as presented by Kolb, Ostermeier, Ruisz and Schleich – we are prone to presentism and moving in circles from one alleged innovation to another. Adding tertium comparationis to the way we understand foreign language education – either with a synchronic or diachronic perspective that the Munich works both in fact take and combine – clearly helps us to gain more understanding of the approaches, theories, and practices of language teaching now and then.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Giesler

Tim Giesler has been a lecturer for English language education at Bremen University since 2010. Prior to that he worked as a secondary teacher for (mainly) English and history at several German schools. His main research interest is the history of teaching English in institutional contexts, a field in which he also completed his Ph.D. thesis on the formation of English as a foreign language at German schools. Furthermore, he is interested in other areas of foreign language education like Content and Language Integrated Learning, teaching literary content or teaching English in heterogeneous contexts.