Nicola McLelland: German through English eyes 1858-2000
What German language textbooks for British learners can tell us
Location: Old Library Building, Research Beehive, room 2.20
Time/Date: 3rd February 2011, 16:00 - 17:00
ReCap online and handout
This paper presented a project to catalogue and examine German text books used in the UK since 1858 (the year of the first Oxford and Cambridge Junior papers).
Drawing on a large corpus of textbooks specially compiled for the project, but making reference also to examination papers and syllabi (e.g. held in the archive of Cambridge Assessment, one of the main exam. boards in the UK), as well as to ethnographic interviews with former teachers (cf. Gardner 2003), and to data collected about which textbooks were used where and when, the project will investigate the changes in how German and Germany been presented to British pupils in German language lessons. Despite isolated studies of German textbooks for English speakers (Van der Lubbe 2007, 2008, Durrell 2005, Langer 2008), this is almost entirely uncharted territory.
The paper will present the methodology and theoretical underpinning of the project, and will reflect on the importance of the personal biography of textbook authors in understanding the striking differences between textbooks of the same era, from Otto Siepmann (the author of what is arguably the first school German textbook for British learners, 1896) to Dagmar Fischer, author of Deutschland Erleben(2000). It will also report on some preliminary forays into the material with some (hopefully moderately entertaining) examples.
References:
Durrell, Martin. 2005. Sprachnormen, Sprachvariation und Sprachwandel im DaF-Unterricht. In Perspektiven der Germanistik in Europa. Tagungsbeiträge, eds. Eva Neuland, Konrad Ehlich and Werner Roggausch, 189-193. Munich: iudicium.
Gardner, Phil. 2003. Oral History in Education: Teachers' Memory and Teachers’ History. History of Education 32:175-188.
Langer, Nils. 2008. GERMAN LANGUAGE AND GERMAN IDENTITY IN AMERICA: EVIDENCE FROM SCHOOL GRAMMARS 1860–1918. German Life and Letters 61:497-512.
Van der Lubbe, Fredericka. 2007. One hundred years of German teaching. AUMLA December 2007 no vol no:143-152.
Van der Lubbe, Fredericka. 2008. Constructing Germany: The German nation in Anglo-German grammars of the 18th century. In Anglo-German linguistic relations, eds. Falco Pfalzgraf and Felicity Rash, 63-72. Frankfurt: Lang
Published: 24th September 2010