Kategorie: English articles

Abstract

The contribution is a biographical report on the elaboration of en1ightened monolingualism in foreign language teaching and includes the following parts: 1. Introduction: How I changed my mind – 2. Double comprehension – 3. Mother-tongue mirroring – 4. The generative principle – 5. The mother-tongue – mother of languages: Making sense of the world; Grammatical concepts – 6. All languages dance the same dance – 7. The joy of recognition – 8. Practice report: Children for future, children for peace. 

Zusammenfassung 

Der Beitrag ist ein biographischer Bericht über die Ausarbeitung der aufgeklärten Einsprachigkeit im Fremdsprachenunterricht und umfasst die folgenden Teile: 1. Einleitung: Wie ich meine Meinung änderte – 2. Doppelverstehen – 3. Muttersprachliche Spiegelung – 4. Das generative Prinzip – 5. Die Muttersprache als Sprachmutter: Leben und Welt verstehen; Grammatik verstehen – 6. Alle Sprachen erklären die Eine Welt – 7. Die Freude des Erkennens – 8. Beispiel aus der Praxis: Children for future, children for peace.

Journal for EuroLinguistiX 19 (2022): 65-80 

Wolfgang Butzkamm 

1. Introduction: How I Changed My Mind and Adopted a Bilingual Approach 

“The monolingual principle, the unique contribution of the twentieth century to classroom language teaching, remains the bedrock notion from which the others ultimately derive. If there is another ’language teaching revolution’ round the corner, it will have to assemble a convincing set of arguments to support some alternative (bilingual?) principle of equal power.” (Howatt 1984: 298). 

Part of my lifelong work as a teacher and researcher has been to bring about this bilingual revolution or, in other words, this paradigm shift. It is the result of a new language learning analysis, followed by a language teaching analysis as well as practical teaching applications. The latter field, i.e. teaching methods, had been marked by long-standing controversies, by the claims and counterclaims of language masters, authors of methods and propagandists of teaching materials. There were periodical swings of opinion such as for or against “grammar”, for or against “translation”, for or against pattern drill, and so on. Even today, there are stark, striking contrasts between commercial schools and language courses such as Berlitz and Rosetta on the one hand, which make “no translation” their central selling proposition and, on the other hand, for instance, Assimil courses which make systematic use of their learners’ native language in various ways. By the way, Rosetta and Berlitz schools got it all wrong.

It so happened that, at the time when I changed from a grammar school to a new comprehensive school, I came across C. J. Dodson’s Language Teaching and the Bilingual Method (1967)— one of those happy coincidences that gave my professional life a new turn. The newly established comprehensive school started out with 14 fifth grades, and I had four English beginners’ classes with 5 periods a week. For the first time I taught children across the whole ability range. That alone was a real eye-opener. 

I immediately started putting Dodson’s ideas to the test. Having four parallel classes, what I tried with one class I could try again in another, and do it differently in a third or a fourth class. Tinkering with Dodson’s ideas, experimenting with them, trial and error – a private field study, without statistical control, of course. 

I didn’t take long to find out that Dodson’s bilingual techniques worked best. The joy of discovery. Dodson wrote, on the basis of statistically controlled classroom experiments: “Drastic re-thinking for language-teaching methods is called for” (Dodson 1967: 16). So I did just that. I started rethinking what I had been taught and practised as a teacher so far. I found that conflicts about teaching methods could best be solved by taking a fresh look at how languages are acquired generally, in and out of classrooms, and by comparing different acquisition situations, including mother tongue acquisition. It was an attempt at getting our theoretical house in order. So, my book Psycholinguistik des Fremdsprachenunterrichts, first published in 1989 (³2002), had a chapter on “Natürliche Zweisprachigkeit”, focusing on bilingual children. These children used their skills in one language to help themselves progress in the other. In other words, the natural strategies of young developing bilinguals made the exclusion of the MT from the FL classroom seem almost perversely wrong. Incidentally, I found that Leopold’s classical four-volume-study on bilingual children was largely unknown by the teaching profession, perhaps because it appeared in the war years (1939-1949). On the other hand, it was an easy read for Germans since Leopold focused on German-English bilingual children. One may safely assume that Dodson was unimpressed by the direct method orthodoxy of the day because he himself was a natural bilingual, with an English father and a German mother. 

Advocates of monolingualism were content with the standard remark that children learn their first language without recourse to another language, so why not other languages as well? Rarely was the question asked, how do they actually do it, what do the children and what do parents naturally do when their children acquire their mother tongue. What skills do little children have or develop when they pick up a first language? What are the skills they would naturally transfer when encountering a foreign language? A book emerged from this work which I published with my brother, a psychologist: Wie Kinder sprechen lernen: Kindliche Entwicklung und die Sprachlichkeit des Menschen. [How children learn to talk: Child development and the linguistic nature of man] (first published 1999; ⁴2019). 

2. Double Comprehension as the Prime Requirement 

What is the prime requirement, what is the essential condition for language learning to take place? Comprehension is central. It is the key to learning any language. Comprehensible input, usually defined as understanding messages, is the necessary condition for language acquisition. But – it is not sufficient. Understanding messages is not enough. Learners must not only understand what is meant, but also how it is said, that is, how the meaning components combine to produce the message.

(Ital.) Quanti anni hai? 

How old are you? (Understanding the message) 

How-many years have-you? (Understanding the structure) 

Children will only make progress if they receive input that is comprehended at two levels, input that is both semantically and syntactically transparent. 

Parents speak to them accordingly. They help them understand utterances as they emerge naturally from situations, and children are good intention-readers. But more than that, they speak to them in ways that make it easier for them to segment the sound stream and break the utterance down into its meaningful parts, and children are good pattern detectors. For instance, mothers quite instinctively say “give Mummy the ball” instead of “give me the ball”. “Gimmetheball” or “Mama kommt gleich” (‘Mummy will come presently’) is one big chunk of language where words blend together in a continuous sound stream which must be carved up. Mothers help when they say: “Give Mummy-theball”. Here “Mummy” stands out clearly so that, in that phrase, it becomes an open slot to be filled in with other persons. “Give Mummy theball” can be turned into “give Daddy theball”, “give doggy theball” etc… Likewise, “theball” is soon understood as “the ball” and also becomes variable: “give doggy the biscuit”, and so on. Finally an abstract pattern emerges: give + person + object. Parents help children identify new words by putting them in familiar frames such as Give … … or Look at… or There’s a … Children can separate out the individual meaning components. Parents further the children’s pattern-finding processes so that a phrase can become a productive construction. This is basically how language acquisition functions. 

So, while involving them in characteristic communicative give-and-take situations, parents give them what looks like mapping lessons and help them overcome segmentation problems in their efforts to make themselves understood. Notice that “utterances, not words, are the primary reality of language from a communicative point of view” (Tomasello 2003: 326). That is why all learners have segmentation problems, i.e. problems with extracting and separating the meaningful constituents of the utterances they hear. A French mother says: Je vais t’aider ‘I will help you’. This is what the child hears. For him/her, the verb for “help” could be *taider instead of aider. So the child produces utterances such as: *Tu peux me *taider? instead of Tu peux m‘aider? ‘Can you help me?’  

The German child has heard phrases such as “wenn’s regnet” ‘if it rains’, “wenn‘s fertig ist” ‘if it’s ready’, “wenn‘s zu heiß ist” ‘if it#s too hot’, and so she says (for ‘if you come’): *Wenns du kommst rather than wenn du kommst, putting in an s for ‘it’ where it doesn’t belong. Next example: *Zerlaubst du‘s? (instead of Erlaubst du’s? ‘do you give me permission?’) is a real puzzle. How does it come about? The correct verb is erlauben, not *zerlauben. Clara & William Stern, who noted this down, suggest that the phrase comes from a faulty analysis of Papa hat’s erlaubt / Mama hat’s erlaubt. Fathma, whose first language is Turkish, asks me “*Du ichheiße?” instead of Wie heißt du?, and she says: “*Ich wieheißtdu Fathma” instead of Ich heiße Fathma. In classroom English we also come across segmentation errors: *I’m want some bread. *Its looks like a bus. 

So, once more: What is the prime requirement, what is the essential condition for language learning to take place? This is my answer: We learn languages when we are talked to and understand messages in two ways. When we understand both what is meant (functional level) as well as how the meaning-components are organised to express the message (structural level). This is what I have called double comprehension or Doppelverstehen (Butzkamm 1989; 2002). „Sprachen lernt man, wenn sie uns – dem Sinn und der Bauform nach – verständlich zugesprochen werden.“ It is not

enough for learners just to understand messages. Segmentation errors indicate that comprehension at the structural level is incomplete. 

Here are some examples of incomplete understanding. In a German-English bilingual kindergarden a break was always announced with: Get your cups. It was found that some children understood the phrase as ‘Drink something’ (in German Trink was). The communication had worked. But it’s a linguistic dead-end, unless get your cups can be turned into get your anoraks or get your Mummies etc.  

Here is an episodes from a grammar school. Vanessa reports:  

“Our teacher very often demanded silence with the expression: [pikwait], i.e. I heard a [p] at the beginning. To me this was one word and I was absolutely proud when some day I learned the word quiet and when I discovered its meaning. Although I had sensed what Herr X meant to say I could then correct the pronunciation in my mind because I had identified the isolated words.”  

This is the joy of recognition. Why? Because Vanessa can now play around with language like children do and risk new, analogous utterances of her own such as be good, be nice, be careful, be smart…  

Now listen to Martin, also from grammar school:  

“Our teacher used to go through the aisles checking our homework. Sometimes he crossed it out, saying ‘once more’. I knew I had to do it again, but only much later in the school year I discovered that ‘once more’ consisted of the two parts ‘once’ and ‘more’, which literally was ‘einmal mehr’.” 

So, in the beginning, Martin only got the message, in idiomatic German: Noch mal! But understanding the message is only half the battle. Later, he was able to break the expression down to its parts and free the words. And only then could he say things like once a day, once a week, once a month, etc. The language-acquisition game begins, and learners are ready to go.  

Take the French phrase s’il vous plaît. It’s easy to pick up and use correctly. Sounds like a three syllable word. That may be enough for tourists, but not for learners. Only after we’ve recognised the component parts for what they are, we might be tempted to say si le vin vous plaît ‘if the wine pleases you’, si l’hotel vous plaît ‘if the hotel pleases you’, si cette conférence vous plaît ‘if this conference pleases you’. 

s’ il vous plaît 

*if it to-you pleases 

wenn es Ihnen gefällt  

wenn das Hotel Ihnen gefällt  

wenn der Vortrag Ihnen gefällt 

Another example, from my work with migrants from Syria 

Ayna al-metro?  

*Where the underground? 

Ayna al-mahatta? 

* Where the station?

Uridu an akulu shay’an. 

*I’d like that I-eat something. 

= I’d like to eat something. 

I think you can bet your bottom dollar that a lot of Arabic where-questions and I’d-like-sentences go exactly the same way. 

We must understand both the message and how the meaning components combine to produce the message. With this kind of double understanding, functional as well as analytical, little children can produce utterances they’ve never heard before. This kind of risk-taking is a vital part of language acquisition, the crux of the matter. Language learning is not an exercise in fearful error avoidance. Learners venture out to say new things they’ve never heard before. Language acquisition is imitative or reproductive but to a much greater extent it is creative and inventive. 

If double comprehension is indeed the essential factor in language acquisition, this ought to be evident in the history of FLT. And, lo and behold, I did find what I was looking for. There was a bilingual teaching tradition from antiquity to the present day that implemented the principle of double comprehension in practice, but without naming it so. 

I had not noticed this before because the materials were often quite differently organised. But the arrangements all provided the learner with input of the proper sort. I saw the unifying principle in the diversity of the materials offered. That was my joy of recognition, the thrill of discovery.  

I’ll give you two examples, one from the fifteenth century, and another one from the nineteenth century. William Caxton’s Dialogues in French and English (1483) are broken up in short lines and presented in line by line parallel translations so that both a functional and an analytic comprehension is possible: 

Quand vous alles par les rues whan ye goo by the streetes,  

Et vous encountres aulcuns And ye mete ony 

Que vous cognossies, That ye knowe 

Robertson (1842) gives us the original French text with some literal translations in between the lines, plus a separate good translation called “The same in good English”. (See Butzkamm [2012: 99ff.] for these and more historical examples).  

Modern textbooks that consistently apply double comprehension are the Assimil self-study courses and the Reise Know-How language guides, for instance Tigrinya Wort für Wort (a language spoken in Eritrea). We should free ourselves of a fundamental misconception and re-establish the more than 2000-year-old productive alliance between MT and foreign languages. 

To sum up: Double comprehension is the single most important factor in language acquisition. It’s both necessary and sufficient. All the learner needs is input comprehended at two levels. Input that becomes intake. 

3. Mother-Tongue Mirroring 

How does this analysis translate into teaching practice? I recommend mother-tongue mirroring to clarify foreign constructions. Mirroring is a kind of literal translation adapted for teaching purposes,

a way of unpacking opaque phrases and unravelling the puzzle of FL expressions. This is a bilingual technique which can be extremely helpful but is never used in English-only teaching contexts. Here is an example: In textbooks sold around the globe to teach the world the grammar of English you can find explanations like: “If there is no question word in the direct question, we use if or whether in the indirect question.” Do learners really need such a rule, do they need this kind of language analysis?  

For Germans, a simple translation will do the job: 

He wanted to know if…

Er wollte wissen, ob …

Il voulait savoir si…

Fig. 1 

But what about the Chinese construction? Here, for English oder German learners of Mandarin, it’s L1 mirroring that will do the job: 

He wants to know if she is at home.

tā xiǎng zhīdào, …shìfǒu … 他想知道, …是否… 

Fig. 2 

*He wants to know, she yes no is at home.

The Chinese phrase, mirrored in English, x-rayed as it were, provides the clearest possible understanding, and it makes the foreign construction legitimate in the eyes of the learner. It reduces the feeling of arbitrariness we have when something remains obscure. Mirroring is an easy and elegant way of making foreign constructions plausible. You can risk other phrases such as “Can you tell me she yes-no wrote this letter?”, “Do you know he yes-no will come and join us?” etc. Rather a cute way of putting it. 

A FL often confronts us with what – from our point of view – are bizarre, unthought-of ways of organizing thoughts. Here we need the clearest possible understanding not only of what is meant, but must also identify the meaning components and know where they appear in the foreign phrase. Mirroring is a time-efficient way of making some foreign constructions immediately transparent, thus providing us with the expressive means and mechanisms of getting our own new messages across.  

Mirrored constructions are foreign grammar in native words. The single best teaching technique ever is the combination of idiomatic and literal translation. It was successfully used in the past, and can certainly not be used to the same extent for every language pair. It has been banished from the classroom ever since the mainstream adopted a FL only policy. That’s a scandal. The mother-tongue taboo is a patent absurdity. 

Incidentally, mirroring comes naturally. Here are two examples. I overheard a French boy explaining German word order to his friends: “En allemand on dit le petit bleu poisson”. It’s the same in English. But the French say it differently: *the little fish blue. The colour adjective comes after the noun.- A Korean student of mine wrote: “A strategy I had chosen to learn a difficult structure was to compare it to Korean and then memorise a very simple sentence for illustration, for instance, what a good boy you are, where English word order is quite different from Korean.” Incidentally, for Anglophone learners of German, mirroring the corresponding German construction could be helpful, but is probably not needed: 

*What for a good boy you are. 

*What for a silly question.  

*What for a grand spectacle. 

4. The Generative Principle: Making Infinite Use of Finite Means 

This, then, is the core of language acquisition: understanding a phrase in such a way that we detect a pattern in what we hear and make it a model for many more phrases built along the same lines. This is what I’ve called the generative principle. It refers to our capacity to generate an infinite number of utterances from a finite grammatical competence. As far as I know, Humboldt was the first to point this out clearly (“von endlichen Mitteln unendlichen Gebrauch machen”). Chomsky and Pinker took it up. For them the essence of language consists in making infinite use of finite means. Generalising, analogising, taking a phrase or a construction as a prototype, as a syntactical germ cell from which to construct or compose many more phrases at will. Generating new expressions from known ones.  

So language acquisition is a creative construction process. My prime example of this outstanding feature of human language is provided by three-year-old Peter’s creative constructions. He uses precisely this combinatory or generative principle in a way that is unmistakably his own. Where he lacks the exact terms, he helps himself as follows ((Butzkamm/Butzkamm 2019: 290): 

das Zu-Drehen (= drehbare Pappscheibe) “the to-turn” (= rotary cardboard disc),  das Zu-Dranmachen (= Häkchen) “the to-hang-up” (= crotchet), 

das Zu-Bouillon-Reintun (= Suppenkelle) “the to-add-bouillon” (= ladle),  

das Zu-Eier-Rausnehmen (= Schaumlöffel) “the to-take-out-eggs”(= skimmer),  

It’s unlikely that Peter merely imitated someone else. In this way, we all make infinite use of finite means and expand our language. Children do that, for instance, in pre-sleep monologues. This is verbal play of a kind that looks very much like pattern practice for which there is definitely a place in FLT. 

But watch out! Learners don’t know how far they can ride a pattern. So they must go beyond what they’ve been given in order to find out how far they can go. This risk-taking is a must if you want to say new things that fit new situations. As a result, overgeneralisations, i.e. errors, abound in first language acquisition. Yet, these errors are necessary errors. Parents suspect this and most of the time don’t interfere.  

Take the acquisition of the German plural as an example. My brother and I dedicated a whole chapter to this topic. Here it is in a nutshell: Children identify one of several plural endings, let’s say the German –en plural, as in die Hosen, die Hemden, and start using it. They use it for all it’s worth, going well beyond what they have heard and typically overshoot the target. The technical term for this is: They overgeneralise, producing lots of wrong forms such as omnibussen and anoraken, which they have to unlearn as they discover other plural endings. So they revise their grammar. 

To sum up: The learnability of language: Children have 

• intention-reading skills, so they get the messages, e.g. Mandarin nĭ hao ‘hello, good morning’, standard greeting

• pattern-recognition skills, so they understand constructions and recognise the slots where certain words can be plugged in, e.g. Mandarin nĭ hao = *you good. 

Words are no longer buried in a frozen formula but are available for innumerable other phrases. In this, parents assist them intuitively.  

5. The Mother-Tongue—Mother of Languages 

5.1. Making Sense of the World 

We learn how to communicate in a FL by actually communicating in that language. Learning by doing. This is as fundamental as it is banal. Teach English through English. No one in his right mind will deny that. But in an effort to make teachers conduct classrooms in the foreign language, mainstream philosophy has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. 

I claim that, paradoxically, systematic, controlled mother tongue support of the right kind (for instance, through mirroring) does not hinder but help to establish an authentic foreign language atmosphere. It is certainly not a necessary evil. 

In a deep sense, we only learn language once (Butzkamm 2003). It’s the language—or, in some cases, the languages – that we have breathed and lived and grown up in, which lay the foundation for all other languages we might want to learn. It is vitally important that we absorb the implications of this fact. Rather than a liability, L1 is the most valuable resource, indeed the critical one, that a talking child brings to the classroom. If we acknowledge that, the mother tongue taboo, the cardinal error that has crippled foreign language teaching all too long, is rectified. Effective bilingual techniques will be re-introduced in the classroom. 

Years of MT input and interactions in real life situations have shaped our minds in ways that are overwhelmingly helpful for the acquisition of new languages. For reasons of space and time, let us look only at one specific way in which the mother-tongue supports the learning of foreign languages.  

Children have learnt to conceptualize their world and have fully grasped the symbolic function of language. You know how fundamental this is. Mere vibrations of the air can represent persons, things and actions. That’s almost magic! In other words, it’s our genetic endowment. So, no child starts a second language with a clean slate. It’s already been written on. By the time they come into our classrooms, they have concepts and words for whole arenas of experience: food, clothing, family and playmates, plants and animals, television, hobbies and pastimes, and, last but not least, number.  

Number is a case in point. Understanding numbers is fundamental; by comparison, differences between how languages count and compose numbers are negligeable, for instance the reverse order “twenty-one” vs. “one-twenty” in German. That’s peanuts. 

Rather than re-conceptualise the world, we need to extend our concepts and existing communicative resources, with any necessary cultural adjustments. This is also what brain research tells us. We‘ ve got to use established neural pathways and then extend and modify them.  

So the direct principle is a delusion. The very term is somewhat misleading because mother-tongue associations are equally direct. Avoiding the mother-tongue is an intrinsic, neurological

impossibility. Teachers were aware of the irrepressibility (“Ununterdrückbarkeit”, Butzkamm 1973) of the mother-tongue. Even when there is no native word heard, comprehension is, initially, bilingual, as brain research, i.e. word recognition experiments and association experiments have shown. MT words intrude automatically, if we want it or not: “I discovered that even though dragging an elephant into the classroom would undoubtedly make the lesson more lively, the students would still associate the word elephant with their own name for the animal.”(Robert L. Allen, quoted in Butzkamm/Caldwell 2009: 75). 

This, too, is glaringly obvious, and not just the fact that in order to learn a language, you must use it as much as possible. However, teachers who deal with closely related languages such as German and English which have many words and cultural concepts in common are seldom aware of the enormous extent to which the mother tongue contributes to learning.  

5.2. Grammatical Concepts 

For most concepts we just have words, words for the weather, for instance. Other concepts such as number, however, are also expressed by grammatical devices. Both in terms of the lexicon and grammar, the best window on the logic of a foreign language is a naturally acquired language, one for which we have developed a real intuitive feel by actually living it. MT grammars have paved the way to foreign grammars. Let me give you a few examples.  

What could teachers do with learners who didn’t have the concepts of space and time? Toddlers need quite a lot of language input before they start understanding time and use time words correctly such as before, after, tomorrow, yesterday etc.. The mother tongue has paved the way for expressions of time in a foreign language. How can one expect students to understand the essence of the continuous aspect if they didn’t have the notion of incompletion, or duration, on one hand and habitual actions and general truths on the other hand? And it’s so easy to explain the difference between present simple and the present progressive by means of translation: 

What are you reading? Was liest du denn da? 

What do you read? Was liest du denn so? 

What are you eating? Was isst du denn da? 

What do you eat? Was ist du denn so? 

Preschool children have problems with handling time sequences when the second event precedes the one mentioned first in sentences such as: “Before he left, he had another beer”. This is misconstrued as “he left and then had a beer”. But their growing knowledge of the world helps the children to re-interpret the sentence. They have already solved this problem before they learn a foreign language at school. 

Or take the verb give. A German child learns that English give or French donner equals German geben. This is new. In what ways does the mother tongue assist the child in using give in English or donner in a French sentence? Well, the child expects that there is a giver and a person whom something is given to, as well as an object that is handed over. This object may be immaterial such as words (give advice; probably not in all languages). Furthermore, the act of giving implies that it could be in the past etc. In other words the grammar of give is there already, as if served on a silver tray. Of course, there are differences such as I was given a warm welcome, which can be dealt with effectively through mirroring. As children we have accumulated a huge cognitive capital for the rest of our lives, usually via the mother tongue.

Now let’s see what’s better, grammar rules or translations? Well, in some cases, you need both. But how about this rule: “Together with the perfect infinitive, needn’t assumes past meaning, thus negating, or questioning, the necessity of an already-completed action.”  

That’s as clear as mud to a great many learners, even if it was explained in the learners’ native language. Of course, it all starts to make sense with an example plus translation, making the rule superfluous:  

You needn’t have said anything. You needn’t have come.

Du hättest nichts sagen brauchen  Du hättest nicht kommen brauchen.

Tu n’aurais dû rien dire. Tu n’aurais pas dû venir.

Translations can provide a spontaneous intuitive understanding without recourse to language analysis. Here the translation is the grammar.  

Another example: “We use the imagined past conditional when we want to talk about something which might have happened but didn’t happen, and the imagined consequences.” Correct as it is, it is gobbledegook to many learners. To some, it will remain opaque as stone. However, an idiomatic equivalent is likely to clarify things, as in the following: 

If it had rained,  we would have stayed at home.

Wenn es geregnet hätte,  wären wir zuhause geblieben.

S’il avait plu,  on serait resté à la maison.

Here, idiomatic translation is the difference between slinging around technical jargon which only adds to the students’ learning task, and offering immediately accessible insight. People can learn foreign languages even if they are out of their depth when it comes to language analysis. Well, our minds were specially designed to learn languages, but not to do the mental acrobatics of linguistic analyses.  

One more example. What about possession and possessive adjectives? We all take it for granted that we can say “my head” and “my father” as well as “my garden”. But we are also mentally prepared for languages that use a different possessive for “my garden”, because it makes sense to distinguish between alienable possessions, which may have a new owner, and ‘inalienable possession’. Here, a brief explanation / rule in the mother-tongue would be helpful.  

6. All languages Dance the Same Dance 

By the time the child comes to learn a FL, most of these basic cognitive concepts have been acquired. We need not go the same long way to grammar a second time. It is because all languages have evolved means of expressing abstract ideas such as possession, number, condition, agent or doer, instrument, negation, possibility, obligation and a host of others. No matter how they do this in detail, one natural language is enough to open the door for the grammars of other languages. Children can’t define pronouns, but they can handle them. They can’t define adjectives, but they can recognise and use them. This is because, in Steven Pinker’s words, “all languages are cut from the same cloth” (Pinker 2002: 37). Or take Humboldt (1836: 4f.): It’s a beautiful idea 

“dass die Sprache eigentlich nur Eine, und es nur diese eine menschliche Sprache ist, die sich in den zahllosen des Erdbodens verschieden offenbart.” (‘Language is actually only one, and it is only this one human language that manifests itself differently in the countless ones on the face of the earth’). 

This is the reason why the MT is the greatest asset any human being brings to the task of FL learning. It is the sharpest tool to cut into the FL and reveal its anatomy. The mother tongue should be made use of accordingly, at the right time, in the right context, in carefully crafted bilingual techniques. Certainly not in a haphazard, indiscriminate and counterproductive way, as is, unfortunately, so often the case. Overuse of L1 by tired teachers is misuse. 

To sum up. It’s all there already. It has taken children years to obtain the cognitive, communicative and grammatical competencies which make instruction possible in the first place. It makes excellent biological sense for a new language to piggyback on this open channel of communication. If learners didn’t make most of these connections by themselves, foreign language teachers could pack it in straight away. Teachers should assist students in making the right connections rather than leave them to their own devices. They should exploit these cognitive resources rather than ignore them, and prevent their students from picking up the wrong clues. 

All this amounts to a true paradigm shift because the monolingual approach was the perceived didactical correctness for so many years and in so many countries. It was hailed as the natural method, which it isn’t. 

MT support touches upon all the major domains of foreign language teaching: vocabulary, grammar, texts, communication, emotional aspects of learning, even pronunciation. I claim that a well-targeted, unobtrusive, but systematic exploitation of the explanatory and diagnostic potential of learners’ own language(s) will not hinder but help to establish the foreign language as the working language of the classroom. And we all know how important that is. 

Unlike many others I’m not just pleading for a more flexible, less rigid attitude towards own language use, but I’m arguing for a radical departure from what I believe is just a face-saving compromise, with small concessions to some MT support. Way back, in 1976, I advocated nothing less than a paradigm shift (cf. Butzkamm 1976, reprinted in Butzkamm 1978). 

Today I am not the only one. In a state-of-the-art article Hall and Cook (2012: 299) write: “The way is open for a major ‘paradigm shift’ in language teaching and learning”. There is one well-known teacher trainer and author, Mario Rinvolucri, who openly professed a change of mind. This is what he writes: 

“Thirty years ago I was so much part of the Direct Method orthodoxy of the day that I frowned on bilingual dictionaries and one day found myself miming the word ‘although’ in an elementary class! When I learnt Spanish academically at secondary school, I wore out a couple of bilingual dictionaries in my keenness to launch from the mother tongue into the unclear waters of the target language. In my teenage foreign language work, mother tongue was the semantic bedrock that all my explorations built up from. How had I managed to exclude my real experience as a language learner from my practice as a language teacher for so many years?” (Deller/Rinvolucri 2002: 21). 

7. The Joy of Recognition 

Rebecca, a neighbour’s daughter, had had her first French lesson and was back from school, rather unhappy. Could I come over and help, asked her mother. Rebecca explained what worried her. She could present herself with Je m’appelle Rebecca, but in French it was four words instead of the three German words Ich heiße Rebecca]. And she showed me the book. To her it just didn’t make

sense. I told her that what the French literally say is “I me call Rebecca”. She could now see the logic of the French phrase, and her world was back to normal. The joy of recognition. Shining eyes. To be sure, perhaps only a lesson later, the penny would have dropped, without my intervention— Rebecca being the the conscientious and intelligent girl she was. 

Afterthought: In the digital future it will become unthinkable not to use L1 as a wonderful toolbox to unlock the door to foreign languages—with teachers as guides. 

8. Practice Report: Children for the Future, Children for Peace 

After my retirement I ran an English club at the local primary school. Once a week I met with a group of 7-10 fourth graders, i.e. ten-year-olds, just for one lesson of 45 minutes. Two form teachers sent me their best pupils all of whom, after year 4, changed to the local grammar school. What follows is largely based on this work which I enjoyed hugely. Unfortunately, I had to stop teaching when Corona came, and, as if that wasn’t enough, then the great flood came and destroyed the school buildings.  

8.1. Content Vacuum – An Undesired Side-Effect of the Monolingual Dogma 

When teaching beginners, an undesired side-effect of a monolingual approach is a content vacuum. In an effort to make a monolingual presentation possible, textbook authors not only use more pictures and graphs, but also carefully select words and their order of appearance and reduce word density by spreading new words out over more text. Great care is taken to introduce new constructions with familiar vocabulary, and new vocabulary in well-known constructions. Not surprisingly “The vocabulary sizes of learners reported in research studies typically fall well short of the size requirements”, says Schmitt (2008: 332), reviewing the research to date. The result often is banal texts without educational value, especially for beginners. The stories, stripped of powerful words and colourful expressions, tend to become indifferent and educationally stultifying. 

As far as English in German primary schools is concerned the teaching focuses far too much on individual words, words for colours, words for animals, words for parts of the body and things to eat etc., because they can be easily taught with pictures. Modern coursebooks, on all accounts, are colourful. Oh, yes, they are colourful indeed, no doubt about that. But does it make them better for language learning? 

8.2. Making Language Learning Relevant: Songs and Dialogues.  

The thin language soup served up to beginners is the price paid for the MT taboo. Bilingual techniques, in contrast, give teachers and textbook authors much more freedom in the choice of words und thus allow them to use richer, more authentic texts sooner and to transmit larger vocabularies. They also enable teachers partially to bypass the grammatical progression of textbooks. The postponement of, let’s say, do-negation or the past tenses is not necessary. 

Accordingly, I did songs such as We are the world (Michael Jackson)/ Don’t know much about history (Sam Cooke) / Look for the bare necessities (Jungle Book), and, of course, Let it be and even Yesterday (The Beatles) with my primary school children. It is simply because I liked these songs and I was sure they would like them too. Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World is especially useful because one can teach the names for all school subjects. So, without the L1 taboo, we can have authentic and evocative texts even for beginners. This alone is tangible evidence of the benefits of a bilingual approach. The cognitive and intellectual demands can be stepped up a cog.

I also composed my own texts for my ten-year-olds, usually short, actable and sophisticated dialogues on topical themes. Language needs company. With dialogues learners can enjoy team work and create moments of excellence for themselves and their audiences. They can learn something about themselves and at the same time about our modern world. The dialogues can be intellectually challenging and can be very different from the food usually served to children. In a way it means killing two birds with one stone, thus making language learning enjoyable as well as relevant.  

Climate change and peace are central problems of our world today. It is important to raise awareness of them as early as possible. Here is the dialogue on climate change I used with my primary school children, along with slogans from the internet, and another dialogue on war and peace I wrote for secondary schools, with quotations for discussions. 

8.3.1. A Better World: A Dialogue and Slogans for Young Learners of English 

Lina: How can you make the world a better place? 

Mia: How can you make the world better? 

Do you really mean it? 

Lina: Of course I mean it. 

Mia: Begin with yourself. 

Study hard and learn English well. 

Lina: Why? 

Mia: Well, you know, with English, 

you can talk to the world. 

Lina: So what? 

Mia: Think of Greta from Sweden. 

She speaks to the whole world. 

She demonstrates for our future. 

Lina: What does she say? 

Mia: She says: 

Our house is on fire. 

Save our future. Save our planet. 

Lina: Oh yes. Save mother earth. 

Earth first! 

Here are some of the slogans I collected from posters on the internet: 

Save our planet! Save mother earth. Earth first! There is no planet B. There is only one earth. Defend the planet! Protect your planet! Love your beautiful planet. Your planet needs you. Stop deforestation. Stop pollution. Stop soil erosion. Stop the climate crisis! Recycle plastic bags. Keep our planet clean. Help end poverty! Help end hunger! Clean water for all! Water is life. Save our precious water… 

8.3.2. Children for Peace: A Dialogue and Quotations for Learners of English Seek peace and pursue it, the Bible says.  

Pursue it?  

What does it mean? 

Follow it, chase after it actively.

You mean, dem Frieden nachjagen? 

Yes, that’s it. 

Do everything you can to keep peace. 

Yes, in war people suffer. 

People get killed. 

Men, women, children… 

Why is it so difficult to get peace? 

Because to keep peace you must be ready to make compromises. 

Really? Are you sure? 

What does this mean for the Ukraine? 

I’m not sure. 

All I know is that the Ukrainians must decide themselves on their own way of life. Yes, and not the Russians and not the Americans. 

8.3.3. Quotations for Discussion 

If you want peace, then prepare for war. 

Better a bad peace than a good war. 

Better an insincere peace than a sincere quarrel. 

Quarantine the aggressors. (Franklin D. Roosevelt 1937) 

When you quarrel, do it in such a way that you can make up. 

A peace which comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace. Peace is expensive, but war is infinitely more expensive. 

In the arts of peace man is a bungler (= ein Stümper). (George Bernard Shaw)  Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. (John F. Kennedy 1961) As among fish, so among men: the larger swallow the smaller. 

War is the continuation of politics by other means. (Carl von Clausewitz) 

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. (General Omar Bradley) 

The war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. (Siegfried Sassoon, World War I)

Right is more precious than peace. (Woodrow Wilson) 

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far. 

When it’s a question of peace one must talk to the devil himself. (Édouard Herriot 1953) 

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry. (Winston Churchill) 

The key to peace: Stop blaming each other. Do better next time. (Signe Knutson) 

It was of course impossible to discuss the climate change with my primary school children, but I said a few words in German by way of explanation, mentioning the Children for Future demonstrations in Aachen. They learned how to act out the dialogue and say the slogans. This needs practise and is indeed hard work. To articulate a word such as “deforestation” and “soil erosion” is a challenge for beginners and can be fun if they finally succeed and get it right. Motor skills are involved, as they are when you learn to do a somersault. And when acting out a dialogue you don’t want your learners to end up with a rotten accent and a rotten intonation. The smooth rehearsal will not work optimally overnight. So the teacher should have some expertise in using the sandwich technique properly as well as using the printed text effectively as a support right from the beginning, in a way that minimises interference errors. There is a lot of repetition and learning by heart involved, and the teacher must know how to turn this work into a pleasurable activity. All this has been described in detail in Butzkamm/Caldwell (2009: 142ff.), in the context of mastery learning and skill theory. In addition, there are some videos on my youtube channel and more teaching material on my website. 

Wolfgang Butzkamm 

Aachen, Germany 

wbutzkamm@web.de 

References 

Butzkamm, Wolfgang (1973/1978), Aufgeklärte Einsprachigkeit: Zur Entdogmatisierung der Methode im Fremdsprachenunterricht, Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.  

Butzkamm, Wolfgang (1976), “Methodenstreit und kein Ende”, Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 3: 227-235. Butzkamm, Wolfgang (1989/2002), Psycholinguistik des Fremdsprachenunterrichts. Natürliche Künstlichkeit: Von der Muttersprache zur Fremdsprache. Tübingen: Francke. (English summary in: H. Weinstock (ed.), English and American studies in German. A supplement to Anglia. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1991, 171–175).  Butzkamm, Wolfgang (2003), “We Only Learn Language Once: The Role of the Mother Tongue in FL Classrooms: Death of a Dogma”, Language Learning Journal 28: 29–39. 

Butzkamm, Wolfgang (2004/2012), Lust zum Lehren, Lust zum Lernen: Eine neue Methodik für den Fremdsprachenunterricht, Tübingen: Narr.  

Butzkamm, Wolfgang / Butzkamm, Jürgen (1999/2019), Wie Kinder sprechen lernen: Kindliche Entwicklung und die Sprachlichkeit des Menschen, Tübingen und Basel. 

Butzkamm, Wolfgang / Caldwell, John A. W. (2009), The Bilingual Reform: A Paradigm Shift in Foreign Language Teaching, Tübingen: Narr. 

Deller, Sheelagh / Rinvolucri, Mario (2002), Using the Mother Tongue: Making the Most of the Learner’s Language, London: Baskerville Press Ltd.  

Dodson, C. J. (1967), Language Teaching and the Bilingual Method, London: Pitman. 

Hall, Graham / Cook, Guy (2012), “Own-Languge Use in Language Teaching and Learning”, Language Teaching 45: 271-208. 

Howatt, A.P.R. (1984), A History of English Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Humboldt, Wilhelm (1836), Ueber die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues, Berlin: Dümmler. Pinker, Steven (2002), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, New York: Penguin. Schmitt, Norbert (2008), “Review Article: Instructed Second Language Vocabulary Learning”, Language Teaching Research 12: 329-363. 

Tomasello, Michael (2003), Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, Harvard: Harvard University Press. 

More items can be found in Butzkamm/Caldwell (2009). Readers may also have a look at my website: fremdsprachendidaktik.de 

Wolfgang Butzkamm ♦ Michael Lynch
Evidence for the Bilingual Option:
Re-Thinking European Principles in Foreign Language Teaching

Abstract

In Europe and the western world in general, the monolingual approach has persisted in the guise of the communicative approach—clearly a direct method derivative—until the present day. This paper calls for a drastic revision of a methodology where the learners’ mother tongue is only a stopgap device. It presents different groups of learners who testify to the effectiveness of a bilingual approach. The evidence is in: For beginners, L1 [first language] support is an
immediate solution, not a last resort. Detailed proposals are made to improve courses for immigrants with native languages unrelated to conventional European school languages. At the same time, this paper calls for a bringing together of foreign languages teachers and teacher educators to conduct combined research on what works best for foreign language learners.

Sommaire

En Europe et le monde occidental en général, l’approche monolingue a triomphé sous forme de l’approche communicative – très nettement un dérivé de la méthode directe – jusqu’à nos jours. Cet article se prononce pour une révision drastique d’une méthodologie selon laquelle la langue maternelle n’est qu’une aide charnière. L’article présente de différents groupes d’apprenants qui témoignent de l’efficacité de l’approche bilingue. L’évidence est
claire: Pour les débutants le support par la langue maternelle est une solution immédiate, il n’est pas un dernier recours. Des propositions détaillées sont offertes pour améliorer des cours pour les immigrés qui ont une langue différente que les langues conventionnelles offertes dans les écoles européennes. En même temps, cet article fait un appel aux professeurs de langues vivantes et aux formateurs d’enseignants à travailler ensemble pour faires des recherches collaboratives pour trouver les meilleures méthodes d’apprendre une langue étrangère.

Zusammenfassung

In Europa und der westlichen Welt im Allgemeinen hat sich der monolinguale Ansatz im Gewand des kommunikativen Ansatzes – klar ein Ableger der direkten Methode – bis zum heutigen Tage duchgesetzt. Dieser Beitrag plädiert für eine gründliche Überarbeitung einer Methodologie, bei der die Muttersprache der Lerner nur als Nothelfer fungiert. Der Artikel zeigt unterschiedliche Lernergruppen, die jeweils die Effektivität des bilingualen Ansatzes bezeugen.
Damit ist klar, für Anfänger ist die Unterstützung durch die Muttersprache eine unmittelbare Lösung und nicht einfach ein letzter Ausweg. Es werden Vorschläge gemacht, um Kurse für Zuwanderer mit nicht-europäischen Herkunftssprachen zu verbessern. Zugleich plädiert der Artikel für eine engere Zusammenarbeit von Lehrern und Lehrerausbildern. Es gilt, sich über effektive Unterweisungstechniken zu verständigen.

Here you can download the complete essay: Evidence for the Bilingual Option

Hier finden Sie den kompletten Aufsatz zum Download: Evidence for the Bilingual Option

 

Pictures fail to convey meaning

 

Pictures can clarify many words, but, as empirical studies have shown, they are not good at clarifying constructions to a point where they can be re-used and modified to fit new situations. Learners must comprehend how the different meaning components interact to produce the overall meaning. In other words, constructions must become transparent. Pictures can’t do this, but another language can.  “Will you make me a sandwich?” Pictures can illustrate this scenario but not the precise wording that was actually used to produce the meaning. It could have been: “I could do with a sandwich now.”  Or: “What about a sandwich?” Or: “Have you got a sandwich for me?” etc.  A mere situational or global understanding as illustrated by a picture is not good enough to help learners understand a construction to the extent that they could induce the structure and adapt it to different situations, thus making – according to Humboldt –  “infinite use of finite means”: “Will you make him /her / them a sandwich?” “Will you make us a drink?”  Pictures never ever have the perspectival flex­ibility of a language to clarify the constructions of another language. If we can use the learner’s mother tongue, many problems disappear. It is the structural richness of one language that best explains the structural complexities of another.

Looking backward: When audiovisual textbooks with dialogues accompanied by picture strips and audioversions on tape appeared on the market in the 1970s, it was claimed that, at long last, a purely monolingual approach could be fully implemented. With the help of the pictures, so the authors maintained, every teacher could easily convey the meanings of the dialogue lines. The direct method was said to have failed in the past only because of the artificial conditions of classrooms which excluded real life. But carefully devised pictures, also available as slides, could bring the real world into classrooms and do the job. Bilingual vocabulary lists were no longer necessary.- This reasoning should be confined to the dustbin of history. A naturally acquired language, usually the mother-tongue, is the sharpest tool to cut into the anatomy of another language.

 

Wolfgang Butzkamm

From drill to discourse.

(Audioversion on youtube)

Exploiting the combinatorial power of language.

The lecture is an attempt to revitalise pattern practice methodology with concrete examples taken from various classrooms. Observations of how learners acquire languages naturally without pedagogical interventions provide a theoretical foundation. In the first part, I argue that double comprehension (understanding both functions and forms) is the most important single factor in language acquisition. I then present semi-communicative bilingual drills as an exercise type which facilitates pattern recognition, achieves fluency through oral repetition and focuses on meaning rather than on syntactical manipulation. Although the drills work with contextless sentences, these sentences can be processed as fragments of discourse and can lead right into communication, as documented in lesson transcripts. The problem of learning transfer from drill speech to real speech can thus be solved.¹

This lecture has two parts. In the first part I shall talk about how we humans learn languages independent of teaching arrangements. These observations provide the theoretical point of departure for my teaching suggestions. First, analysis of natural language acquisition, second: teaching proposals.  Because we can only teach with confidence and clarity, if we understand how learners learn.

In language use and language learning, meaning is all-important, and comprehension is the key to learning. We begin to pick up the language when we identify bits of language and their meanings. Obviously, comprehensible input, usually defined as understandable messages, is the necessary condition for language acquisition. But it is not sufficient. Learners will crack the speech code only if they receive input that is comprehended at two levels. They must understand both what is meant – they must understand the message –  and how things are quite literally expressed, i.e. how the different meaning components are put together to produce the message. This is the principle of double comprehension.

In many cases both types of understanding can be conflated into one process, in others not. Children often get the meaning first before they understand the wording in detail. They initially acquire utterance wholes, fixed formulas (also called routines) which must be carved up until all their constituents and content elements can be used freely.

This learning process has been graphically demonstrated by Lilly Wong-Fillmore (1976), who observed five Mexican immigrant children in their Californian primary school, in their families and on the playground for a school year. Bit by bit the children began to break down their formulas and perceive a pattern with open slots in it allowing their language to become productive.

Lemme-see-it is at first one chunk, where my grandchild Noa would just say “gucken”; another one is I wannit, where Noa simply says  “haben”. Fillmore’s children started to break down these expressions into a fixed part (which is underlined) and a variable part:

Lemme see it the tweedle

I wannit the scissors

The structures eventually became variable in all their slots.  “Ich wieheißtdu Fathma“ is an example from German as a second language.

So children make the passage from formulas or chunks like Lemme-see-it to Let Robert see it; Let him do this etc. ; they begin to understand their internal grammar by extracting the words which they then use to build utterances of their own.

Here are examples of the pattern-finding process from L1 acquisition.

English children make mistakes such as it’s went or it’s played. French: Tu peux me taider? The model for this phrase is probably parental utterances such as Attends, je vais t’aider.  So for my grandchild Astor, who grows up in France, the verb is initially taider, not aider. He has not separated out verb and pronoun.

German:   Wenns du kommst. The force behind this are phrases like wenn’s geht, wenn’s regnet. But what about: Zerlaubst du’s?

This is a real puzzle. How does it come about? Clara & William Stern, who noted this down, suggest that the phrase comes from an incomplete  analysis of Papa hat’s erlaubt / Mama hat’s erlaubt.  I hope you‘ll never forget it. Children have to solve numerous riddles on their way to grammar. So let us keep our sense of wonder alive. Language acquisition is not an easy thing, not  just child’s play, it’s a miracle deeply embedded in our genes,  but a miracle which we slowly begin to understand.

Incidentally, at this point in first language acquisition, parents help their children in various ways. Here are two ways you are all familiar with. At the beginning, parents tend to avoid personal pronouns. „Now Mary has got the ball. Now Mummy has got the ball – instead of saying “you” and “I”. Mary and Mummy are  unambiguous, whereas the pronouns change their referents  and are more difficult to grasp.

And parents ask a lot of didactical questions such as What’s Mummy’s  name? What’s your little sister’s name? Caregivers give the child very finely tuned feedback, they restructure their own language, so that many parental utterances can be seen as mapping aids as well as segmentation aids that separate out, isolate and identify certain meaningful constituents and thus ease their children’s way into language. They make them hear certain words so that they stand out clearly – words which normally run together and blend together in a continuous stream: “Mamakommtgleich”.

All learners, not just children in natural acquisition situations, have problems in sorting out individual words and their distinct meanings, as we can see in the following examples.

A child learning English in kindergarten produced the sentence “I need three napples, please” ( as reported by Peltzer-Karpf, (2003)). He must have thought that “an apple” was actually “a napple”. The same kind of error was made centuries earlier when along with the Spanish fruit the Spanish word “naranja” was imported into England and wrongly understood as “an aranja”, which became “an orange”.  Analysis stopped half-way.

Similarly, classroom learners must break down utterances from their constituent parts in order to be able to recombine them meaningfully.  French beginners are usually taught the phrase “Je m’appelle Christophe”.  What Germans usually understand is “ich heiße Christophe”, which becomes a puzzle when they see it printed. So they should also know that the French actually say “Ich mich nenne Christophe”.  Again, double comprehension is needed. But puzzling this out costs mental resources. So why not clarify it right away by mirroring the phrase in German, as I just did?

Burmeister reports that some children in a bilingual kindergarten thought that “get your cups” meant “Trink was”, which clearly shows that understanding messages, getting the idea, getting the intention,  is only half the battle. So learners need help here, and we’ve seen that parents do help children to understand and tease apart (auftrennen) language patterns, which is just one way of scaffolding (abstützen) their learning processes. (LASS)

Teachers, for their part, can use mother tongue mirroring to scaffold foreign language learning. Mirroring the foreign construction in the native language is a natural strategy.  I remember an Australian boy who told me:

Whereas the French say “le petit poisson bleu”,” der kleine Fisch blaue”.

A Korean student of mine wrote: “A strategy I had chosen to learn a difficult structure was to compare it to Korean and then memorise a very simple sentence for illustration, for instance, what a good boy you are, where English word order is quite different from Korean.”

In my next example a pupil remembers a typical misunderstanding:  “Our teacher often demanded silence with the expression: [pikwait]. To me this was one word and I was absolutely proud when some day I learned the word „quiet“ and discovered its meaning. Although I had sensed what Herr X meant to say I could then correct the pronunciation in my mind because I had identified the isolated words.” Only from then on are sentences like be nice, be good,  be friendly within her reach. Or take the phrase See you tomorrow. German beginners who don’t see the phrase printed automatically assume this means bis morgen, which is literally until tomorrow. With this half analysis they can produce time phrases such as see you later, or see you on Monday etc., but it will prevent them from producing location phrases like see you at the gym, see you at the bus stop. Only a full analysis of the phrase such as provided by mother tongue mirroring  Seh euch morgen will do the job.  Double  comprehension is both necessary and sufficient.

Let’s change perspectives. Think of an English tourist who asks you: How do you say “What’s the time?” in German? You tell him: Just say: Wie spät ist es?  This works well from a communicative point of view. It’s the perfect equivalent, though not the only one. However, it’s good enough for tourists only. Language learners need to know more: *How late is it? That’s what the Germans say literally, which gives us the anatomy of the phrase, and the logic behind it.  That way, the German time phrase could become a recipe for many more sentences:

How old is it? –              Wie alt ist es?

How long is it –              Wie lang ist es?

How expensive is it? –    Wie teuer ist es? etc.

„Tes̜ekkür ederim“, in Turkish, means „thank you“. You’ve understood the message, which – as I’ve just said –  is a necessary condition for acquisition, because you can now use the phrase yourself.  But a formal, analytic understanding will take you much further: *”Thanks I make” or even better: “thanks make-I”. Because „I“, the personal pronoun, is expressed by the ending  -im. This kind of explanation, which I‘ve called mother tongue mirroring, is an elegant, plausible and highly satisfying way of clarifying foreign constructions. And yet it is conspicuously absent in our coursebooks, although it is easily understood and will eventually  help students to build more sentences along the same lines. They can analogise, improvise and risk sentences they’ve never heard before, which is the essence of language learning. That’s the point, the crux of the matter.

A Chinese student of mine (Tong Wu) reports:

“When we were in China I saw that double comprehension can indeed make a difference in a learner’s FL production. In those cases where my German friend only knew what a Chinese utterance meant, he could hardly be creative in terms of making new combinations out of what he just understood. In contrast, when he knew not only what it meant but also how it was constructed, he could easily create new expressions of his own to fit into different situations.”

And that’s precisely what children do. They want to say their own things. They  actually take risks, and sometimes go too far, and so they produce their well-known overextensions or overgeneralisations,

Hocher, vieler, die vielsten

Omnibussen, Anoraken; Onkels, Apfels

German past participles such as *aufgehebt, *ausgezieht, *ausgesteigt

plurals like mouses and foots,

past tense forms like sticked, bringed, putted, hitted.

All these forms which they can’t have retrieved preformed from memory, show that they are well on their way to grammar even if they overshoot in these cases.

Peter, between 2 and 3 years old, also produces his own forms with which he communicates successfully:

 

• Das-zu-Dranmachen = Häkchen
• Das-zu-Schmeißen = Luftballon
• Das-zu-Bouillon-Reintun = Suppenkelle
• Das-zu-Eier-Rausnehmen = Schaumlöffel…

Very useful, if you don’t  remember the names of things. – Similarly, my grandchild Olivia who grows up trilingually in France uses a mixed French-German sentence pattern which she can’t have heard before:

 

veux runter (want down)

veux Haus (want toy house)

veux anziehen (want to get dressed)

veux kuck (want to look)

veux Ilse (= she wants to talk to her aunt on the phone)

 

Language acquisition is innovative and creative.  It is not the acquisition of a growing repertoire of ready-made phrases or formulas with which tourists try to operate. Children not only imitate –initially this is all they can do – but then they go beyond what they’ve heard. They generate language, and through language, new ideas. This happens all the time, but we can only be sure that they don’t just reproduce what they’ve heard if they produce unconventional and ungrammatical language.

One last point before we come to teaching techniques: Children sort of  practise, or play with,  sentence patterns in non-communicative situations such as pre-sleep monologues. Witness the kind of unsolicited verbal play that Weir (1962, 109) recorded when her son was left alone in the dark before he went to sleep:

What colour

What colour blanket

What colour map

What colour glass

…

Here is a monologue from my own child: Papa pommt / Mama pommt / Auto pommt…

(pommt = kommt)

 

And, as I’ve just pointed out, playing with language is playing with ideas, as Natasha shows us who explores the counterfactual:

 

(Natasha is playing with Natasha; to herself, fast):

(pointing to her nose)                                         this is my foot

(pointing to her eyes)                                         this is my nose

(pointing to her foot)                                          this is my eyes

(pointing to her mouth)                                      this is my neck

(pointing to her bottom)                                     this my head

(pointing to her ankle)                                       this is my wrist…

Let me conclude this part by insisting that only with double comprehension can learners bring the basic and exclusively human property of language into play, its combinatorial power. It’s the core property of language, according to Chomsky, the core capacity which in our teaching methodology is referred to as the generative principle. In Humboldt’s famous words: We can make infinite use of finite means.

Denn sie (= die Sprache) steht ganz eigentlich einem unendlichen und wahrhaft gränzenlosen Gebiete, dem Inbegriff alles Denkbaren gegenüber. Sie muss daher von endlichen Mitteln einen unendlichen Gebrauch machen, und vermag dies durch die Identität der Gedanken- und Spracheerzeugenden Kraft. (Humboldt 1963, 477)

 

Notice the two aspects of the combinatorial power of language: the inexhaustibility of what is sayable and thinkable.  By manipulating the building blocks of language we produce new thoughts.  Language is not just for communication, it’s for thinking as well as for communication, it’s our thought organ.  This trick, so to speak, of combining and recombining, accounts for the vast expressive power of language. Is grammar the motor of thought? Does grammar make us smart?  Smarter than all the other beings on earth? Question mark!

 

What follows from this for teaching? What shall we do, as teachers?

The sentences pupils encounter in their basic texts such as dialogues, stories or songs must not remain encapsulated in those texts but must be varied and become productive sentence patterns. For instance, the line “What shall we do with a drunken sailor”, i.e.  the shall I / shall we construction  must not remained enshrined in the well-known sea shanty, but must be made available for other ideas such as:

What shall I do with my hair? What shall I do with my back (it hurts)?

What shall we do with our maths teacher (too much homework!)?

What shall I do with my wife? What shall do with my life?

We have thus opened up completely new dimensions and are miles away from drunken sailors.

In other words: A sentence must become a recipe for many more sentences, a germ cell for numerous other sentences. But watch out! Sentence variations must be experienced as sense variations, not just as syntactical manipulations, as Humboldt reminds us. We may safely assume that children who permutate sentences even in non-communicative situations are interested in the novel ideas which they generate, and not in syntax.

The problem is that pattern recognition, our innate instinct for analogy, comes only into play after a fair amount of concrete linguistic material has been learned (Tomasello 2002, 98).

So as teachers of 3hpw learners who don’t receive the massive language contacts of natural learners we cannot simply rely on the pattern-finding skills of children. This would be a sort of didactical Rousseauism, the naturalistic fallacy: Just make yourself understood and leave them alone with the language. No, we must find the right methodology to accelerate the learning process:

1. We must shorten the process of pattern recognition

2. We must practise a construction so it can take root and learners feel encouraged to risk something new on the analogy of what is familiar.

The solution I propose are semi-communicative bilingual pattern drills. They ought to be a cornerstone in our teaching methodology.  I shall spend the rest of this lecture to show how they work in practice.

How to proceed

1. Select a sentence that can be easily turned into a productive pattern from a basic text that has been studied carefully. It could be song, a story, a dialogue. The sentences are thus anchored in well-understood situations, but must now be freed from their embeddednes in a specific situational and linguistic context.

Here are two dialogues performed by my primary school children who I teach once a week, in the last lesson of the day: English is cool & Black eye sketch.

Wrong World is another such basic dialogue which the children have to act out: The very first sentence contains an important construction: Will you make me a sandwich?

2. Make sure the sentence is doubly understood. Learners should know what it means and how it means.

3. Begin with easy substitutions

• Machst du mir mal bitte n Brot?
• Machst du mir mal bitte zwei Brote?
• Hilfst du mir mal bitte?
• Hilfst du mal bitte deiner Mutter?…
• Spielst du mal bitte mit deiner kleinen Schwester?
• Wollt ihr mal bitte stille sein!

Now make your own sentences.

 

4. Every bilingual drill is turned over to the students and thus becomes monolingual: Now make your own sentences.  Don’t give too many prompts, but leave space for the learner, so that they can come up quickly with their own sentences: Will you please help your father / big sister/ friend  etc.

5. Use your voice, mimes and gestures to support meaning: „Wollt ihr mal bitte stille sein!“ That’s what makes oral MT cues effective.

Or take another sentence from the same dialogue:

• Etwas stimmt nicht mit dieser Welt.
• Etwas stimmt nicht mit meinem Computer.
• Etwas stimmt nicht mit unserm Lehrer.
• Etwas stimmt nicht mit ihm.
• Etwas stimmt nicht mit meiner kleinen Schwester.

Now make your own sentences, English sentences.

6. So here is yet another point: We need to explore the communicative potential or reach of a given construction. So notice the mental leap from computer to teacher, i.e. from things to persons. Incidentally this little leap from things to persons is a big leap for retarded children. It seems that intellectually alert pupils make these semantic leaps by themselves and readily change topics whereas others keep within given domains, for instance animals or food items. But all learners must learn to generalise across various domains of experience. With older learners you could risk a sentence like there’s something wrong with our democracy. Notice the big shifts in terms of content in my next example, which is the line ‘All I want is a room somewhere’ from Eliza’s song in the musical My Fair Lady. Before starting, we make sure the learners understand both the message and the construction. We then elicit sentence variations from our class:

All I want is a nice cup of tea

All I want is a quiet class

…

All you want is love, but all you get is video.

The teacher’s idea is to practise the formal device of a ‘contact clause’ where the relative pronoun is left out. But in the minds of the pupils, these are variations on the theme of wishes and dreams, rather than a structure drill. The teacher asks himself how he can show his pupils through interesting substitution possibilities that this construction is suitable for their own needs of expression. His job is to probe the communicative radius of a construction, explore its semantic potential.

The exchangeable sentence elements become of greatest importance.

The next example is taken from the dialogue Home sweet home.

This is a wonderful opportunity for students to experience the function and form of present progressive constructions.

T: Ich mache einen Kuchen, bin dabei, einen Kuchen zu backen. In English?

S: bake a cake.

T: I‘m baking a cake.

S: I‘m baking a cake.

I‘m baking a cake.

T: Ich mache grad ne Pizza.

S: I‘m…

T: making

S: I‘m making a pizza.

T: Ich mache grade Sandwiches…

The example shows that repetition and easy substitutions are necessary for the learners to establish the specific sound structure of a construction and to get into the rhythm of it. Mistakes will be made, but will be ironed out, or practised away, through repetition of correct constructions. Part of language learning is habit formation, and this takes several successful repetitions, perhaps up to a dozen.  Repetitions are necessary for new constructions to take roots.

Naturally mother tongue cues don’t always succeed. It can happen that the mother-tongue words rather than the idea expressed functions as the mental trigger. In other words a pupil begins to translate, constructing an English sentence word for word analogous to the German wording. We need experience to effectively deal with or forestall interference errors. Most of the time errors can be prevented through appropriate cueing and sequencing or immediate prompts (schlichtes Vorsagen).

Aber ich mach doch grade meine Hausaufgaben. Use: doing.

• But I‘m doing my homework.

Und ich spiele grad Geige. Aufpassen…die Geige!

• And I‘m playing the violin.

The aim is of course for the pupils to operate at the content level and de-verbalise the mother-tongue cue, as conference interpreters do (deverbalisation hypothesis, see Butzkamm 1993, 57). In traditional monolingual pattern drills the pupil solves a formal problem: a word or word group has to be substituted at the right place. Bilingual drills run along different mental tracks. With mother tongue cues the pupil expresses an idea, as we do in normal speech. Where the idea comes from is of course important, so we always switch from teacher’s cues to sentences generated by the students themselves. The drill presents or exemplifies constructions instead of describing them, and simultaneously reveals their communicative range or radius. The rules are caught rather than taught.  No analytical and terminological overkill, as is often the case in the teaching of grammar..

We can help students to get into the rhythm of a construction and maximise language turnover through reciprocal pair work. Here is the dialogue  Head Boy / Head girl adapted from the Peanuts series.

In this short dialogue  the ‘ll construction occurs three times:

 I’ll help you / we’ll vote for you / I’ll do it and so it suggests itself for practice.  The teacher starts the drill as usual but then hands out a worksheet with German-English parallel columns. One partner gets the sheet and acts as the teacher who gives the mother tongue stimulus sentences.

Okay, ich mach’s. – Okay, I’ll do it.

Whenever his partner hesitates, he will prompt him with the correct answer.

Double comprehension again:  Because before the drill starts, the teacher explains: „We say: Ich mach’s. But the English say it differently: Ich werd’s machen.“ So the pupils notice the contrast. With MT cues, we don’t shy away from the contrast, we take the bull by the horns.

Habit formation again: Through repetition + variation the foreign construction becomes less foreign and begins to sound natural. Learners start developing  some kind of Ohrgefühl / Bauchgefühl for this construction. Only recently a Realschul-teacher pointed out to me, that good pupils could be trusted to write these exercises themselves, then be the teacher and practise with the class. A classical example of Learning by teaching (LdL).

With this activity learners can experience a sort of language explosion, because the number of sentences made available to them is rapidly increasing, and chances are that learners could eventually use some of them for personal communications.

I also suspect that bilingual drills are particularly useful if we can bring the FL and the  MT into sharp contrast: How long have you been doing this? Wie lange schon…? Learners must make the equation: the German wie-lange- schon-phrase is associated with the English have-been-doing construction.

The crowning glory of bilingual pattern drills is when the teacher succeeds in giving sentences, i.e. ideas that relate to problems of the day, in other words, when he can personalise, individualise or localise his sentence cues.

Here’s an example (grammar school, 2nd year English) where the teacher alludes to an impending general election in Germany in 2005: Schröder vs. Merkel. The class had been practising  somebody needs somebody or something.

Teacher                                                                      Student

Angie (Merkel) braucht Hilfe.Sie braucht Hilfe von ihren Freunden.Angie braucht Hilfe von den Wählern. Say: voters.Herr Schröder braucht auch Wähler.Sie alle brauchen unsere Stimmen. Say: votes.

Angie needs help.She needs help from her friends.Angie needs help from the voters.Herr Schröder needs voters, too. They all need our votes. Everybody needs somebody to love.

 

And you could end up with: Jeder braucht einen zum Liebhaben.  Everybody needs somebody to love. It’s a pity I didn’t remember the phrase at the time.

This distinct focus on meaning would be impossible without L1 cues – which shows that the controversy about the use or non-use of the students’ native language is not to be solved with the banal advice to use it “judiciously”.

Results: from drill speech to real speech

Admittedly, a drill series cannot focus on meaning in its full force, because here language is not used in social encounters. So never have pattern drills been meant to replace truly communicative activities.  But can they prepare for them? Yes, they can.

The stage is set for a bit of real communication when the students are asked to make up their own sentences. When they do this, most of them are not performing language operations in a void. Some students may play it safe and give easy examples, but others will feel tempted to vie with the teacher, take risks and produce “loaded“ sentences. Be that as it may, the teacher can always ask a pupil: Is this sentence true for you? Or he can jump in directly, like the teacher in the following example. The class is practising the present continuous, and a pupil comes up with this sentence:

Pupil:     “My sister is doing a test in class 9b.”

Teacher. “Is your sister a pupil of this school?”

Pupil:      “Yes, she is.”

Teacher:   “What test is she sitting?”

Pupil:      “A maths test.”

Teacher:  ”So she is sitting a maths test right now? I hate maths. Do you like maths?” (Silke H.)

The teacher can always step out of grammar practice, he can do as if the pupil meant it seriously and can thus build small communicative islands in a sea of language practice.

Here is an example from a fifth form in their very first year English in a German secondary modern school of the 1980s (Hauptschule). The teacher (Stefan Eschbach) takes the sentence I’ve got a good idea from a previously introduced dialogue and starts with a bilingual pattern drill.

 

T:         Ich hab‘ einen phantastischen Einfall.

P:         I’ve got a fantastic idea.

T:         Wir haben eine wunderbare Idee.

P:         We’ve got a wonderful idea.

T:         Er hat immer gute Ideen.

P:         He’s always got good ideas.

T:      Ehm… Ich hab‘ ’ne grüne Idee.

P:      I’ve got a green idea.

T:      Ich habe ’ne blaue Idee.

P:      I’ve got a blue idea.

 

Stefan’s pupils had only a few adjectives available for substitutions. The teacher therefore makes a virtue out of necessity by presenting these comical sentences – just one of the means of shifting the focus from form onto sense. There is sense in nonsense!

Eventually he produces a loaded sentence and breaks out of the drill with a question:

T:      Ich habe einen dummen Lehrer. –  Okay, Jenny.

P:      I’ve got a silly teacher.

T:      Have you got a silly teacher?

P:      Yes.

T:      Ehm… Would you … ehm … be so kind as to tell me his name?

P:      Mr. Morrison.

PP:    Hahaha

T:      You’re laughing, hm?

 

Naturally the teacher receives an immediate answer which he was in fact expecting: he himself is called Mr. Morrison in his English lessons. This is a very brief communicative exchange, but we all start small, don’t we.

As a final step, the class can be instructed to write their own dialogues in groups, i.e. to change basic dialogues by using the sentence variations just practised. Remember the dialogue Home sweet home?

This is a dialogue written by pupils and based on Home sweet home. It was sent to me by someone who was then a trainee teacher with Marco Hoppe:

Belling? Yes, learners must take risks…

Here is another example of a dialogue written and performed by my pupils in the 1980s. But first the original Peanuts dialogue

• Lucy: What‘s going on here?
• Charlie Brown: I‘m helping Snoopy to bury a bone.
• Lucy: Good grief!

Can‘t he do that himself?

• Charlie Brown: He hates getting his hands dirty.

 

The teacher enters the classroom.

• What‘s going on here?

We‘re playing football.

•  Sorry, but who‘s playing football?

Peggy, Mary, Betty, Ann and I.

•  Girls playing football? What are the boys doing?

They‘re playing with dolls.

Good grief!

And after a group presents their play, there is an opportunity for the class to ask questions, to comment on the play and even suggest how to improve it.  The teacher helps to clarify  what was perhaps unclear. This allows for some spontaneous messsage-oriented communication which is, ultimately, what we need. Because, as we all know, we learn how to communicate by communicating. So we are getting the results.

In my language teaching philosophy, however, the generative principle, which targets at the productive  power inherent in language  and puts it to use, is as important as the communicative principle. Sadly, it has been grossly neglected in mainstream thinking.  Teachers can harness these natural skills with semi-communicative pattern drills as I’ve just shown.  The drills proposed are grammar at work, grammar in action.  Yes, walk the walk from drill to communication and self-expression. Here is an example of pattern practice which my pupils made meaningful and enjoyable through intonation, mimes and gestures. I taught these phrases bilingually, but now the pupils no longer need the German: „No parroting“

Conclusion

Carl Sagan said: „When you are in love, you want to tell the world.“  Yes, and when you really have a message, you also want to tell the world. I feel I have a message to put across, because what I’ve just told you is far from the mainstream, and I feel passionately about this.

With regard to MT use in the L classroom, John Caldwell, Guy Cook and others think that „the way is open for a major paradigm shift in language teaching“ (Hall & Cook 2012, p. 299).  So let us do away with a MT taboo which is only self-crippling. Foreign language teaching must be based on a new foundation, the pupils‘ native language.  Millions of average language learners in average schools, and taught, on average, for 3-5 lessons per week, would be just a wee bit better off if teachers knew how to use the right kind of monolingual as well as bilingual techniques. Let me end by quoting from the epilogue of our book The bilingual reform. It is called „Capitalising on a priceless legacy“. This priceless legacy is our mother tongue, and FL teachers must make it their ally. Here are our concluding lines:

„Believe in the power of teaching. Experience the excitement of teaching. Teach with MT support. Teach with the wind beneath your wings.“

1. Sources

Wolfgang Butzkamm,  Lust zum Lehren, Lust zum Lernen (³2012), chapter 9: „Richtig üben: das generative Prinzip“ (pp. 237 – 274)     

Wolfgang Butzkamm & John A. W. Caldwell, The bilingual reform. A paradigm shift in foreign language teaching (2009), chapter 6: „How to teach structures the bilingual way“  (pp. 120 – 141)

Wolfgang & Jürgen Butzkamm, Wie Kinder sprechen lernen (³2008), chapter: „Das Jahr der Grammatik .“ (pp. 238 – 264)

„Why Make Them Crawl If They Can Walk? Teaching with Mother Tongue Support„  In: RELC Journal 42/3, (2011), 379-391.

 http://www.fremdsprachendidaktik.rwth-aachen.de/Ww/wmccw.pdf

 

Handout

From drill to discourse.

Exploiting the combinatorial power of language.

Wolfgang Butzkamm (wbutzkamm@web.de)

The lecture is an attempt to revitalise pattern practice methodology with concrete examples taken from various classrooms. Observations of how learners acquire languages naturally without pedagogical interventions provide a theoretical foundation. In the first part, I argue that double comprehension (understanding both functions and forms) is the most important single factor in language acquisition. I then present semi-communicative bilingual drills as an exercise type which facilitates pattern recognition, achieves fluency through oral repetition and focuses on meaning rather than on syntactical manipulation. Although the drills work with contextless sentences, these sentences can be processed as fragments of discourse and can lead right into communication, as documented in lesson transcripts. The problem of learning transfer from drill speech to real speech can thus be solved.

Natural language acquisition

• Children hear complete utterances, not just individual words.
• They understand messages, i.e. what is meant, and later produce messages.
• But the input they receive must ultimately be comprehended at two levels: They must also detect / extract the recurring patterns behind the utterances, they must free the words. Why?
• Because they must learn to recombine the meaning components in new ways  in order to say things they’ve never heard before.
• They try new sentences & novel ideas and thus make infinite use of finite means.

Foreign language teaching

• Double comprehension is the most important single factor in language acquisition and foreign language learning.
• 3hours-per-week learners don’t get the amount and type of exposure necessary for both understanding the messages and finding the patterns all by themselves.
• But they all have a naturally acquired language – a huge cognitive capital  accumulated over years – which is used to crack the code of foreign constructions.
• Teachers must work with this capital rather than ignore it.
• Sentences taken from well-known texts must be perceived as sentence patterns and become a recipe for many more sentences / ideas.
• Bilingual pattern drills with a dual focus both on fluency and on content can be processed as fragments of discourse and lead right into communication.

Study questions and tasks

Do it yourself! Choose a productive pattern and devise your own bilingual structure drill along the lines laid down in the text. Try it out on your group. Can you adjust your sentences “to the moment”, to the needs and preferences of your fellow students?  Can you spontaneously involve them in short communicative interludes?

Compare bilingual drills with the standard monolingual exercises of schoolbooks. Discuss strengths and weaknesses.

Rivers notes in her learner’s diary (1979, 77): “It is very important to try out in new sentences what you have just learned, if not to others, at least in private talk to yourself”. Do you agree? Have you observed yourself doing this?

“Drill work before free work. This is perhaps the most important of the precepts to be observed” (Palmer 1921, 74). Discuss.

When is explicit grammatical knowledge needed, when not?  When do we need a rule along with grammatical terms?  Or is a mirrored version enough for learners to immediately see the point?  Give examples.

At the beginning the teacher analyzes the construction for the pupils and makes sure learners understand both function and form of the new construction. Should we rather rely on self-discovery?

How can we guard ourselves against persistent errors which echo the students’ own language (interference errors)?

The following objections could be raised by adherents of the communicative approach:1.Producing new sentences on one’s own is still far away from real conversation.

2. One should not practise with isolated, disconnected sentences because they are non-communicative. Discuss.

 

 

 

(Poznan 2013)

My lecture falls into three parts. I shall explain (1) the principle of double comprehension as the prime requirement for language acquisition to take place.

I shall move on to (2) a re-evaluation of the role of the mother tongue in foreign language teaching, which, rather than be ignored, can be made our most powerful ally. I shall explain (3) the generative principle and demonstrate bilingual semi-communicative pattern drills as a way into the grammar of a foreign language.

The time is ripe for slaughtering two sacred cows of our mainstream philosophy:  1. L1 is not a last resort when nothing else will work. It is indispensable for a quick and complete grasp of new constructions, one which leaves no questions unanswered.

2. Grammar practice need not always be situational or contextual so as to lead the learner gently into communication.There is a place for pattern drills with  disconnected sentences. However, drills must be presented as sense variations rather than syntactical manipulations.

 1. Double comprehension

What are the basic conditions for language learning to take place? What are the prime requirements that have to be fulfilled? There are two. Language acquisition begins when people speak to us in ways we can understand. Comprehended input is the single most important factor in language acquisition. It is the essential precondition for our own participation in dialogue.

But learners must understand more than messages. We also have to understand not only what is meant, but how the messages are put together, how they come to mean what they mean, in other words how things are quite literally expressed. So let’s distinguish these two types of understanding. On the one hand understanding what is meant: Let’s call it situational or functional or communicative understanding: We get the full message, we get the idea as precisely as possible so that we can react meaningfully to it. This understanding is something that a good, idiomatic translation can provide. The second type of understanding refers to the way the message is structured. Let’s call it structural, or formal, or operational understanding. This is something that in most cases a word for word translation can provide us with.

As native speakers, once we understand the message, we also understand how the meaning components interlock to create that meaning. But this is not true for infants learning their mother tongue, and it is not true for FL learners. Here, the distinction is important because languages often express the very same idea in different ways which are not immediately transparent to beginners but remain cryptic for a while at least.

I claim that a kind of double comprehension – situational and structural – is needed for all types of language acquisition, including L1 acquisition. Admittedly, to acquire a mother tongue, it seems that all a child needs is to be talked to in understandable ways, i.e. to understand messages. Okay. But as infants receive more and more comprehended input in recurring and often only slightly changing situations, they do not only understand the messages in a global way so that situations and intentions become clear, they also begin to figure out various parts of the messages, and they notice how the situations change along with, more or less in synchrony with, parallel changes in the language: “ball” might change to “balls”, if there is more than one of these bouncing objects around. With more and more speech contacts, they will break the messages down and work out the syntax all by themselves, which, to me, is one of those miracles of evolution, one of those evolutionary feats.

Parents feel that here is a problem for the children.  An intuitive understanding of the French phrase “maman t’aime” (which, when pronounced, could be heard as one word, a three-syllable word) is not enough. Ultimately, the child must not only understand that this is an expression of love (easy), and that it is “maman” who does the loving or where this love comes from (again easy), but the child must also detect where she herself, i.e. the loved person / the person spoken to is hidden in that phrase and must separate it out from the idea of loving. This is difficult because she only hears a continuous flow of language and does not see this phrase in print where the meaning components are clearly separated. It is also difficult because the person talked to is only represented by just one sound, the consonant t. So parents intuitively help the child. Instead of “I love you”, she says “Mama loves you”, or even “Mama loves Mary”, which makes it easier to relate event components to message components, to make a form-function connection and crack the code.

Parents do quite a lot to make the child’s job easier, but it’s the babies themselves who contribute the lion’s share. Little by little researchers begin to understand that babies’ brains make complicated calculations with the conditional probabilities of languages which they are constantly revising to figure out how the language works.  Now in order to do their statistics they need massive amounts of input over many years and they get it. This is the critical mass hypothesis.

But, for a foreign language taught at school there is simply too little input, too little exposure, there are too few meaningful interactions  for learners to make these form-function connections and extract the patterns all by themselves. Teachers must actively and comprehensively support the process of double comprehension and pattern recognition.

Let us look at the French s’il vous plaît. From an English point of view, real meaning and literal meaning differ. When someone hears s’il vous plaît for the first time, they might think that, like its equivalent “please”, it is a single word, only with three syllables instead of one. Only when they see it in writing does it become clear that the word for ‘please’ consists of four parts:

s(i)      il       vous                    plaît

*if       it       to-you                  pleases; or:

*if       it       you (Dative)        pleases

if       it       pleases                 you

Do we need to know this? Yes, we do, if we want to acquire the FL instead of just making ourselves understood for a moment. Knowledge of the structure not only helps us understand why the phrase means what it does, it equips us with a key phrase we can draw on in the future. We can risk new, analogous utterances such as ‚si l’hôtel vous plaît‚, ‚if you like the hotel‘; ‚si le vin vous plaît‚, ‚if you like the wine‘. And we can understand similar, as yet unfamiliar utterances when we hear them from others.

Let us consider an example from a less known language. In a bookshop on the island of Malta I recognized the image on a book cover – and the author’s name Saint-Exupéry” made it clear: “Il-princep iz-zghir” meant “The Little Prince.” With that we can not only understand the title but we have also half analysed its structure. “princep” must be “prince”. We need a full analysis, though, to move on: “The prince the little” is how the Maltese put it. Now we can also understand phrases like “il-bahar il-mejjet”, “the sea the dead”, i.e. “the Dead Sea” and we might try to construct (or: generate; generative principle) expressions along the same lines:

il-princep  iz-zghir           the prince the little                  The little prince

il bahar     il-mejjet          the sea the dead             The Dead Sea

il bahar     l-ahmar          the sea the red               The Red Sea

A mere situational understanding from the context does not help the language learner very much. He also needs to understand how the foreign language operates, i.e. identify words and recognise patterns in order to be able to make “infinite use of finite means” (Humboldt 1836 / 1963, 477). (Language  … confronts … a truly boundless area, the scope of everything conceivable. It must therefore make infinite use of finite means.”) Without this analysis, learning a formula such as “s’il vous plaît” would remain mere vocabulary drill.

Here is another pattern from the same language, one that a tourist might need:

Fejn hu l-katidral            Where’s the cathedral?

Fejn hi l-knisja?              Where’s the church?

Fejn hu l-ktieb?               Where’s the book?

The printed text seems to give away most of the structure, and the tourist may wonder why there are two words “hu” and “hi” for the one word “is”. Without the literal translation the phrase remains a half-opened package, and we are not yet on the way to grammar. But once we are told that the Maltese actually say

* Where he the cathedral?

* Where she the church?

* Where he the book?

omitting, like many other languages, the copula “is”, it all makes sense in a satisfying rush of insight, and we feel ready to ask our own where-is-questions.

We love it when we get the trick, don’t we, when we get the hang of it.

Put yourself in the place of a beginner. An English tourist looks up his phrasebook. He wants to ask for the time of the day. “Wie spät ist es bitte?” That’s the German phrase for “What’s the time, please?”.  But this knowledge is a linguistic dead-end, unless he can disembed the linguistic elements from the whole. *”How late is it?” – That’s what the Germans say.  Formulas must be unpacked, words must be freed. Only then can we improvise more sentences such as “Wie groß ist es?” or “Wie alt ist er?”

Only after recognising the component parts for what they are, after understanding both what is meant and how it is said, can we analogise on the basis of this insight and acquire a productive sentence pattern. So the generative principle comes into play.

Or take a visitor to China who wants to be polite and picks up the greetings phrase: “Ni hao”.  But only if he can break the phrase down (= *You good), will it become a stepping stone to other phrases such as “wo ai ni” (= I love you), where „ni“ reoccurs.

A German teacher, who teaches monolingually, at the end of the lesson often used the phrase “See you tomorrow”, a phrase that the kids didn’t see printed. Most kids got the idea. For them it meant “Till tomorrow” since that’s the natural German equivalent. It’s a time phrase.  But only if the phrase was mirrored in German: *”Seh euch morgen”, countless location phrases such as “see you in the playground”  would also be easily accessible.

Excuse me for multiplying examples for what may seem obvious. But I need to insist here on the generative principle which is largely ignored by the communicative approach or other recent methodologies. It refers to the human capacity to generate an infinite number of utterances from a finite grammatical competence. It reflects what Humboldt thought was the crucial feature of human language, wich is sometimes called compositionality. Meanings are built out of parts and from the way these parts are combined. A finite stock of words or word groups can be recombined again and again to produce innumerable novel sentences ( – and thus, new ideas).

Telling the time of the day provides illustrative examples of how differently languages operate to express the very same ideas. It’s a lesson popular with teachers because the meanings are crystal clear and the lesson can be easily conducted without resorting to the MT.  I remember a French teacher who was practising telling the time in French with a toy clock. The pupils used the time  phrases correctly, but as an observer, one couldn’t help having the impression that some of them had no idea of how the French expressed the phrase “five minutes to eight“  = “huit heures moins cinq”, i.e *eight hours minus five,  which  means five  minutes missing, five minutes to go until it is eight o’clock.  I think they would have welcomed this information of how the French actually construct this idea. Likewise, English learners of Polish would probably welcome a mirrored version of the Polish phrase.

I also observed that learners spontaneously use mirroring all by themselves. In a school in Geneva I overheard a French speaking boy saying: „En allemand on dit ‚le petit bleu poisson'“. The boy was actually trying to make sense of the German phrase, and to make it legitimate, so to speak. Why has this largely been overlooked by our textbooks?

To sum up: Simple understanding from the context of the situation does not lead the language learner far enough. Multi-word utterances must be broken down for us to understand their internal grammar. Only to the extent that we understand both meaning and form can we turn input into intake which can be processed syntactically. Only then can we make utterances of our own which we have never heard before.

2. Re-evaluation of the role the mother tongue

So much for the fundamental principle of double comprehension. Now what have I done? I  have given you FL examples and clarified them via English, a well-known language to you. If I knew Polish, I would have used it instead of English.

Because the perspectival flexibility of a naturally acquired language to elucidate the form-meaning constructions of an unknown language is without equal.

The best window on the logic of a foreign language is a naturally acquired language – usually the mother tongue –  for which we have developed a real intuitive feel.

I‘ve used English here in two ways: idiomatic translations for message comprehension, and for structural comprehension I have used a kind of literal translation which I have called mirroring. The  foreign phrase is imitated in the native language. The native language is bent and twisted and pressed into service to reveal the FL structure.  With your mother tongue, you usually know how far you can go in twisting and bending and adapting it to a foreign structure before it in itself becomes incomprehensible.

These two types of translation don’t figure much in modern textbooks.  Bilingual devices are not mainstream philosophy, not yet.  There is a mismatch between what research tells us and what textbooks do and what  teachers are told  to do. Here’s  just one example. The Internet course Rosetta Stone explains the approach chosen like this: „It essentally means  that you learn German in German, without translations, like you picked up your  mother tongue.“

No, no. no. If this sounds like nonsense, well, it is. We can never duplicate L1 acquisition in the classroom.

Okay, then, Let’s have a fresh look at the role of the mother tongue. Theoretically, it’s all very simple. You don’t learn basketball when all you do is play volleyball. So we can’t learn English by constantly using Polish . We only learn English to the extent that we actually use it. This is blindingly obvious.

But there is another side to the coin. We all must start from where we are. We can only learn a new skill by building upon existing skills, by making the connection. This, too, is common sense, this, too,  is self-evident. It‘ s also what brain research tells us. We‘ ve got to use established neural pathways and then extend and  modify them. So the opposite notion equally carries conviction.

It follows from the first premise that a language has to teach itself. It follows from the second that we must engage the language skills acquired and promoted by the MT.

The allergy to the presence of the MT in the FL classroom undoubtedly comes from its all-too-frequent misuse. „One obvious explanation for the pervasive L1 use in FL classrooms is the low proficiency levels of teachers.” (Krista S. Chambless, in Foreign Language Annals, June  2012). This is not happening way back in Siberia or with underpaid teachers in the African bush. It’s about language teachers in the USA. Well, yes, it’s a real fiasco when less skilled and less proficient teachers simply succumb to the ease of conducting the class in the MT. I can’t go into this here. But the counterproductive, haphazard, inconsiderate and time-consuming  use of the MT in FL classrooms has certainly been a barrier to the true understanding of the issues involved.

Because years of daily encounters with a first language have given the children foundational skills which they need for school. Because years of MT input and interactions have shaped our minds in ways that are overwhelmingly helpful for the acquisition of new languages.

By the time they start with foreign languages at school, children know a lot about language. As they grow into their mother tongue (1) they have learnt to conceptualize their world and have fully grasped the symbolic function of language; (2) they have learnt to communicate, and combine language with body laguage; (3) they have learnt to articulate and use their voice; (4) they have acquired an intuitive understanding of grammar; (5) they have acquired the secondary skills of reading and writing. In acquiring a first language, they have in fact constructed their selves. The MT is therefore the greatest asset any human being brings to the task of FL learning, it is the sharpest tool to cut into the FL and reveal its anatomy. It provides an indispensable Language Acquisition Support System. If learners did not use this support and make the connection all by themselves, in their minds, FL teachers wouldn’t get anywhere. In a nushell: We only learn language once.

In the following, I shall restrict myself   the problem of grammar.

Many grammatical features are directly available for incorporation into the L2 system. However, the path breaking power of L1 grammar is not dependent on the fact that both languages share some grammatical features. MT grammars have paved the way to foreign grammars in ways which are often overlooked. Let us be quite basic here, for the sake of clarity. What could you do with learners who didn’t have the concepts of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in space and time? How can one expect students to understand the essence of the continuous aspect if they didn’t have the notion of duration? Children do have problems with handling time sequences when the second event precedes the one mentioned first: “Before he left, he had another beer”. This is misconstrued as “he left and then had a beer”.  Consider that complex structural areas such as tenses or passives are acquired step by step. In the beginning, children’s strategy of taking the first noun in the sentence to be the agent leads them astray when confronted with passives. In L1 English or German this is gradually sorted out, firstly through cases of semantically irreversible passives such as “The girl was bitten by the spider” which then spreads to semantically reversible passives.  Their  knowledge of the world helps the children  to re-interpret the sentence. However, by the time the child comes to learn a FL, most of these difficulties have been overcome and we need not go the same long way to grammar a second time.

We may, for instance, take it for granted that we can say “my head” and “my father” as well as “my garden”. But we are also mentally prepared to use a different possessive for “my garden”, as some languages in fact do – because it makes sense to distinguish between ‘alienable’ and ‘inalienable possession’. Even if there is no conjunction  “if” in a language, that language can express conditions, and our mother tongue has the means of clarifying these if-less constructions. It is because all languages have evolved means of expressing abstract ideas such as possession, number, agent, instrument, negation, possibility, condition, obligation and a host of others, no matter how they do this, that one natural language is enough to open the door for the grammars of other languages.  It is because “all languages are cut from the same cloth” (Pinker 2002, 37), it is because all languages dance the same dance.

To sum up. It’s all there already. The challenging engineering problems that children have solved as they learn to speak  are coming to light more and more. It has taken children years to obtain the cognitive,   communicative and grammatical  competencies which make instruction possible in the first place, be it maths, geography or another language. Many skills and knowledge sources are available at the FL initial state. They are the base camp from which we all set out to conquer new language territories It makes excellent biological sense for a new language to piggyback on this open channel of communication. All this has been largely ignored by the monolingual teaching philosophy.

3. The generative principle and bilingual pattern drills

Comprehension and explanation are ways of knowing. But speaking is a skill, so knowledge must be turned into a skill. Comprehension must be followed by practice.

I’ll now move on to a particular teaching technique, i.e. to  bilingual pattern drills and show you the generative principle, with MT support,   works in practice. Remember that pattern drills were designed precisely to help the learner make infinite use of finite means, to help him build new forms according to known forms, to use a model sentence as a slot-and-frame pattern for countless other sentences.

In the sixties and seventies pattern drills were all the rage, mostly in the USA, literally filling hundreds of pages with substitution tables and transformation drills. But an error was made. Linguists, i.e. structuralists and their audiolingualist followers claimed that structures were all important and,  in comparison, words were negligible: “Vocabulary comes and goes. It is the least stable and even the least characteristic of the three components of language.“  True, in a way, but there is a misunderstanding.

This becomes clear when we look at how Humboldt conceived this energeia, this quintessential property of language,  its productive potential or creativity. So let me quote Humboldt again, but more fully than before:

‘Language  … confronts … a truly boundless area, the scope of everything which can be thought. It must therefore make infinite use of finite means, and it achieves this through the identity of the power to generate both thoughts and speech.

According to Humboldt then, combinatorial grammar explains the inexhaustible repertoire of language and thought. Sentence variations must be experienced as sense variations, as variations on meaning. Since language has the power of producing “both thoughts and speech”, we do not just generate novel sentences, but new ideas at the same time. After all, this is what language is for: to communicate  thoughts and ideas from one person to another.  Words are not there  just to play around with, but to convey intentions and ideas.   If words are unimportant, pattern drills can easily turn into a self-contained language game, a mere manipulation of forms, with little relation to the world of ideas and events: In traditional pattern drills, meanings were there, but weren’t   focused on.

The problem seems to be that Humboldt’s energeia is usually only familiar in its abbreviated formulation ‘making infinite use of finite means’ and is thus interpreted in syntactical terms only, and not in semantic terms.

This is probably why pattern drills frequently turned out to be mechanical and monotonous. How could practice on disconnected sentences further communicative competence? To transfer or not to transfer – that was the problem. Audiolingual theory was patently wrong in treating words as mere gap-fillers, a convenient device to avoid the monotony of overlearning the all-important sentence patterns. Instead of re-thinking them, pattern drills were dropped like a hot potato. But pattern drlls, after all, tried to capture what for Humboldt and many researchers is the quintessential property of language, which makes it so extraordinarily powerful, namely our ability to use a finite set of symbols which we combine and recombine to create new meanings.  So they should never have been dropped, but re-designed. That’s precisely whatwe have tried to do. Bilingual pattern drills use oral MT cues, and this makes all the difference, because this ways we start with ideas which have to be put into FL words. There is a dual focus, on content and on fluency.  Ideas, not just words,  are played with and structures are manipulated accordingly,  and the semantic potential of a given structure is explored. Unlike conventional pattern practice, lexical substitutions are not regarded as mere fillers.

Without further ado, let’s jump into teaching practice.

This is how I proceed

• Look for the productive patterns in the basic text
• Clarification: double comprehension + visual support
• L1 cues: easy variations / substitutions/ permutations
• Interesting variations
• Over to you!   (and pair work)
• Interludes /creative writing
  

(Examples of semi-communicative bilingual pattern drills – and further analysis –  are contained in Butzkamm & Caldwell, The Bilingual Reform, pp. 124ff. This lecture draws heavily on this book)

Another objection raised against pattern drills is that they work with isolated sentences, which would be ineffective in principle. But even in the absence of a context of situation, disconnected sentences, if understood, inevitably take on meaning because the listener can immediately imagine fitting communicative contexts. Can’t you imagine those contexts on the spot, spontaneously? Wouldn’t we all know without giving it a moment’s thought when, where and to what intents and purposes we could use these sentences? This is because the sentences express common concepts familiar to us via the MT. All dictionaries operate with illustrative disconnected sentences because we can make those sentences real for ourselves. That’s why our students are not performing language operations in a void. It is high time the myth about ineffective isolated sentences be dispelled. The successful completion of step seven is also evidence for the fact that isolated sentences can lead directly to a context of situation. A bridge is built between pattern practice and creative message delivery.

The bilingual pattern drills which are proposed here meet five different needs:

• The need to spot the pattern or regularity of a sentence, to see the slots into which different words may be plugged.

• The need to find new, analogous items to fit the perceived pattern, thus learning how far one can ride a given pattern and establish its limits.

• The need to entrench and to automatise a given sentence pattern, achieving fluency(these three needs have been met by traditional pattern practice ).

• The need to probe the communicative radius of a structure and explore its communicative potential, i.e. the need for the proper words.

• The need to integrate the new pattern into the existing language repertoire and to employ it freely in conversation.

Here is some more advice:

• Use productive patterns of wide applicability, which give the learner a lot to learn from.

• Give insight into the patterned nature of both the source and target language. Students

recognize the common grammatical thread.

• Begin with simple, easy sentences in rapid succession; move on to interesting sentences.

The MT cues are supposed to trigger abstract concepts which in turn trigger the FL construction. This is the psychological pathway we normally follow when we say anything: from concept to expression. The drills should provide plentiful exposure to the relevant linguistic forms in the shortest possible time. Drills should be followed by creative and more communicative activities as explained and documented by Butzkamm & Caldwell.

Monolingualism: Yesterday’s dogma

I’ve tried to explain and demonstrate to you an activity based on two ideas which were frowned upon, well, condemned as Neanderthal practice, by the mainstream philosophy. The monolingual dogma tried to banish the learners’ native language from the classroom. The communicative dogma rejected pattern drill and disconnected sentences.

Free yourself from these ill-conceived prejudices which have harmed, and not helped, the teaching profession. Try them out yourself, these contrastive, bilingual, semi-communicative drills, experiment with them and find out for yourself in a process of trial & error. As Pawel Scheffler points out in his recent contribution to the journal Applied Linguistics: “Neanderthal teaching often actually works.” 

What has kept the monolingual dogma alive for so long?  To my regret, I have found that a change of opinions is rarely observed in elderly academics. They have committed themselves to the monolingual idea and hate to admit that they’ve been wrong. So far as I know, there is only one well-known expert, Mario Rinvolucri, who has openly professed a change of mind.  The epiphany he describes is revealing. This is what he writes:

“Thirty years ago I was so much part of the Direct Method orthodoxy of the day that I frowned on bilingual dictionaries and one day found myself miming the word ‘although’ in an elementary class! There were brilliant people in the class: one student whispered to another, ‘He mean “but”?’ When I learnt Spanish academically at secondary school, I wore out a couple of bilingual dictionaries in my keenness to launch from the mother tongue into the unclear waters of the target language. In my teenage foreign language work, mother tongue was the semantic bedrock that all my explorations built up from. How had I managed to exclude my real experience as a language learner from my practice as a language teacher for so many years?” Thanks, Mario, for being so frank.

A pragmatic, face-saving compromise, i.e. a relaxed monolingualism with small concessions to some MT support, has only muddled the issue. It is no longer acceptable. The MT, or the language which has become dominant in a learner’s life, is the very bedrock indeed for the learning of FLs. Because it’s the best window into the logic of another language. The MT, the mother of languages, as an 18^th century author put it. What is needed is a paradigm shift which, in any academic discipline, almost resembles a change of government or power. The proponents of monolingualism would lose influence. That’s why we can only count on a new generation of scholars to clean up this mess. But we can start now and free teachers from a self-defeating dogma. My hope, my utopia is to see foreign language teaching and learning made much easier than it is now.

 This is a how-to-do it article which was first published in Juergen Kurtz‘ blog Language teaching in the 21st century. The theory and research behind it can be read up in Butzkamm & Caldwell, The  bilingual reform…( 2009, pp. 120ff.)

I have chosen the for +noun / pronoun +  infinitive construction. Though it is eminently useful and transparent to speakers of many languages, I believe it is not much used by intermediate learners  – admittedly I have no evidence for this- , simply because German and other languages prefer other constructions to express the same idea.

 Step1. Lift the construction from a text the students have read and ask them to translate the sentence, for instance:

For human rights to flourish, religious rights have to come second.

For this to happen, we must act now.

For this to work well, we need to know more.

 Here, the for-construction is a means to express purpose. For this meaning  German normally uses a subordinating conjunction, “damit”. In order for the students to associate the infinitive construction with the familiar dependent clause introduced by “damit” , we need to practise:

 Step 2

Teacher                                                     Students

Damit dies passiert, Damit dies funktioniert, Damit dies gut funktioniert, Damit die Märkte gut funktionieren, Damit die Schüler fleißig arbeiten, Damit dies möglich ist, Damit dies nicht passiert, Damit dies kein Problem ist,

For this to happen For this to work For this to work well For (the) markets to work well For (the) students to study / work hard For this to be possible For this not to happen For this not to be a problem

 The open contrast between German: dependent clause, and English: infinitive works as a kind of inoculation against unthinking transfer of mother tongue habits. If the students hesitate, for instance with the negated version, the teacher simply gives the English sentence himself and asks the students to repeat it.

 Step 3. Perhaps the above examples are  enough for a good class. The teacher has set the class on the right track and hands the activity over to the students: “Now make your own sentences along the same lines.” Alternatively, the teacher can allow a few minutes of silence for the students to jot down their ideas. This step is a must. The students must get the chance to experiment with the new construction, and the activity becomes monolingual. The mother tongue drops away.

 Since the construction does not only express purpose but is also widely used in slightly different forms and contexts, these should be practised too:

Es ist schon okay, dass du das sagst. Ist es okay, wenn ich das sage? War es okay, dass ich das gesagt habe? Es wäre falsch, wenn wir jetzt gingen / …falsch von uns, jetzt zu gehen. Ist es normal, dass das passiert? Ich hätte es liebend gern, dass dies passiert. Ich hätte es liebend gern, wenn er käme. Ich wollte nicht, dass dies passierte / Das habe ich nicht gewollt.

It’s okay for you to say that. Is it okay for me to say that? Was it okay for me to say that? It would be wrong for us to go now.   Is it normal for this to happen? I would love for this to happen. I would love for him to come.   I didn’t mean for this to happen.

The students will now find it easy to come up with their own meaningful ideas, using different adjectives and different pronouns: easy for us to…, unusual for them to…, not uncommon for him to…, important for her to….

 Repetition is habit-forming , and believe it or not, part  of language learning is habit formation. For correct speech habits to be formed, we need plenty of language turnover in comparatively little time (The for-construction again!). This is what the exercise provides. Count the number of sentences the students have heard and produced and compare with other exercises which take the same amount of time.

 Bilingual drills will be new for most teachers, who will have to learn, through trial and error, how to use mother tongue cues effectively, what cues work best and what cues are likely to cause interference errors from the native tongue.  Let me say it again: Should the students hesitate (searching for English equivalents), the teacher simply translates his own sentence and makes his pupils repeat it. This is a simple way of avoiding interference errors. Another way of making it easy for the students and allowing them to get into the habit of the foreign phrase is changing only little things as you go from one sentence to the next:

Es war richtig, dass sie weitermachten / weiter zu machen. War es richtig, dass sie weiter machten? Es ist richtig, dass sie weiter macht.

It was right for them to continue.   Was it right for them to continue?  It is right for her to continue.

This is a way of playing it safe. But it can easily become boring unless the pace is rapid.

 Well, yes, this is pre-communicative practice, but see Butzkamm & Caldwell to show you how this kind of drill can lead a class right into message-oriented communication. There is no way to skip the groundwork.

 Just one more example. Years ago, I tried what follows with grammar school kids in their first year of English. The textbook introduced the past tense rather cautiously, restricting the new forms in a first step to was / were / had. Okay, this is grammar, but for the pupils was / were / had are simply new words with a clear meaning, just like bread or butter.

Die Party war fantastisch. Die Party war wunderbar. Die Party war großartig. Betty war da. Tim & Tom waren da. Sie waren da. Alle meine Freunde waren da. Ich war in der Küche mit Tom. Wir waren in der Küche. Wir waren hungrig. Wir hatten Würstchen.                   Die Würstchen waren gut. Die Getränke waren gut. Ich hatte ne Cola. Einige waren im Garten. Es war ne warme Nacht. Betty war nett / freundlich. Sie war nett zu Tom. Aber Tom war nicht nett. Tom war schlimm / schrecklich. Aber du warst da. Ich war glücklich. Es war 11 Uhr. Die Partie war vorbei. Zu schnell.

The party was fantastic. The party was wonderful. The party was great. Betty was there. Tim & Tom were there. They were there. All my friends were there. I was in the kitchen with Tom. We were in the kitchen. We were hungry. We had sausages. The sausages were good. The drinks were good. I had a coke. Some were in the garden. It was a warm night. Betty was nice. She was nice to Tom. But Tom wasn’t nice. Tom was awful. But you were there. I was happy. It was 11 o’clock. The party was over. Too soon.

Mother tongue stimuli here work better than anything else,because of their flexibility. We can even construct drills that tell a story, sort of.

I remember leaving the classroom in almost a state of euphoria, firstly, because the students obviously enjoyed the activity and were able to make their own sentences, and, secondly, because it confirmed a long-standing conviction of mine: the monolingual approach, which has been talked up for more than a century, is a fundamental error.