The article deals with foreign language teaching in the Czech and Slovak republics subsequent to the political upheavals of November 1989. It looks at the situation before the change, and picks up some present problems connected with the changes in foreign language teaching, for example: the vanishing priority of the Russian language, various obstacles to the dissemination of Western languages, different teaching conditions, innovations in curricula and teaching methods, the problematic nature of textbooks as well as the establishment and expansion of non-institutional education which leads to a predominance of analogous solutions. Both republics together went a long way devolping educational policy, which also effects the field of foreign language teaching. As analogous solutions predominate, a more elaborated differentiation of the respective features cannot be given at present.
Aufsätze
This is an interim report on ongoing research on an experimental bilingual education program launched in 1991 in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany, and providing partial immersion for English. The program is being evaluated by a group of researchers from the English Department of Kiel University and headed by Henning Wode. The purpose of the investigations is to contribute towards a better understanding of why this kind of foreign language instruction produces superior results, which aspects of the students’ foreign language competence will benefit from this kind of teaching and which will not, and how these insights can be used to improve foreign language teaching within the German education system. The long-term goal is to determine whether and how two foreign languages can be given the benefit of immersion teaching.
The paper gibes an outline of how the experimental program came about, its major design features, and some to the major findings of the first pilot testings.
The evaluations to date were primarily focused on the linguistic outcomes with 11 – 12 year old students who were receiving only a very low dose of immersion, because in addition to the regular four 45-minute periods per week of English-as-a-subject, they were taught only one subject in English, namely, history for three 45-minute periods per week. The major finding is that already after seven months the immersion students are noticeably ahead of their controls. Moreover, the experimental students can be shown to use linguistic elements which do not occur with the controls and which were not introduced by the textbook. In addition, students, parents, and teachers had a positive attitude towards this new kind of foreign language instruction.
In this pilot study the elaborations of four students learning a grammar text were investigated. Within the framework of a ‘levels of processing model’ think-aloud protocols and a subsequent performance test were analyzed to find out whether “deeper” encodings were associated with higher levels of performance. The results show that the number and the levels of elaborations may distinguish between good and poor performers.
This paper addresses the following issues. What do we mean when we use the term “Language Awareness”. This question is taken up in Section 1. In this section other terminological variants of “Language Awareness” are also discussed. The crucial question “can conscious knowledge become unconscious knowledge”? is also introduced in this section. In Section 2 we receive an outline history of Language Awareness. While focussing on the Netherlands, occasional comparisons are also made with Language Awareness in the UK and Germany. Section 3 is concerned with Language Awareness in teacher education, and Section 4 with Language Awareness in the classroom. The author argues that when it comes to Language Awareness teacher education and classroom practice cannot be viewed in isolation. Section 5 reviews recent research into Language Awareness. The empirical evidence discussed turns out to be inconclusive. The author returns to the question raised in Section1: can conscious learning become unconscious knowledge?
Women’s studies has provided us with new perspectives on literature and awakened substantial interest in the works of women writers. I would like to provide a list of English novels from the 19th and 20th centuries which would be appropriate for upper level high school students and make suggestions for a specifically feminist interpretation of them.