Wolfgang Butzkamm

RWTH Aachen University · Anglistics; professor emeritus

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;...

This paper explains the psycholinguistic basis of a bilingual approach to foreign language teaching. It is an attempt at an integrated view of language acquisition, and examples are given from L1 acquisition, natural second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. Double comprehension is the essential condition for language learning to t...

The article tries to correct a fundamental error that arose at the end of the 19th century and consists in considering the mother tongue in general as an obstacle to learning. This view still prevails at the time of writing (2006), and has recently become part of the didactical correctness of foreign language teaching in German elementary schools....

Inhalt Das Muttersprachenparadox; Dialogarbeit – die Sandwichtechnik; Positive Nebeneffekte des bilingualen Ansatzes; Einwand: Erfolgreiche Einsprachigkeit? Doppelverstehen als Grundbedingung des Spracherwerbs; Deutschkurse für Migranten: die Muttersprachen helfen mit; Problemverleugnung – anekdotische Evidenz; Schluss

This is a translation of a chapter of the book Der Lehrer ist unsere Chance. Wie Schüler ihren Fremdsprachenunterricht erleben / Teachers make a difference. How pupils experienced their foreign language lessons. (Essen 2005). In this chapter I quote extensively from 30 reports written by students who spent a year in British secondary schools as tea...

This is a translation of chapter 5 of the book Der Lehrer ist unsere Chance. Wie Schüler ihren Fremdsprachenunterricht erleben / Teachers make a difference. How pupils experienced their foreign language lessons. (Essen 2005). This book draws on some 500 essays by Aachen university students recounting their school days. The essays, entitled "Myself...

The question of the relationship between language and reality concerns all sciences. For language is not only the preferred means by which they preserve and pass on their concepts. The participation of language in the formation of scientific concepts itself must be considered. It is an old, tenacious dispute as to which is master: thought or langua...

For many second and foreign language learners, the goal of language instruction is fluent oral performance. Such performance can be achieved if the mechanisms underlying L2 performance have been automatized. It is generally recognized that promoting automaticity in the classroom requires massive repetition and consistent practice, which, however, n...

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 test...

In a laudable effort to make teachers conduct classrooms in the foreign language, mainstream philosophy has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. A naturally acquired language is the greatest pedagogical resource that learners bring to foreign language classes, as it lays the foundations for all other languages we might want to learn. Brain resea...

The article develops the theory and practice of bilingual pattern drills. It is argued that bilingual drills with a dual focus both on fluency and content are valuable as precommunicative or even semi-communicative exercises. Mother tongue cues provide a focus on meaning so that learners can process sentences as fragments of discourse which can be...

My paper is based on Butzkamm & Caldwell: The Bilingual Reform (2009) and 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 ignor...

The article addresses the long-standing issue over the role of the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom. In the first part it is argued that the mother tongue lays the cognitive foundations for all subsequent language learning. Double comprehension as the basic requirement for learning to take place is explained. The second part is pract...

A review of Wilfried Decoo's Systemization on Foreign Language Teaching.

The article explains in detail how to rehearse a dialogue with the aim that the students can speak and act it freely and naturally. The dialogue should contain new words and phrases. Among other things, the sandwich technique is used, as well as the printed version of the dialogue. Target language English, source language German. Paradoxically, wit...

This article examines Krashen’s acquisition-learning hypothesis, his input hypothesis, the natural order hypothesis and the monitor hypothesis. Krashen favours what he calls an ‘acquisition approach’ and claims that exposure to comprehensible input and communicative interactions will result in incidental learning superior to what “conventional” cla...

This book has been written to resolve the long-standing debate over the role of the mother tongue (MT) in the foreign language (FL) classroom. In an act of theoretical house-cleaning, the MT taboo, which has been, without justification of any substance, the perceived didactical correctness for so many years and in so many countries, will be swept a...

Originaltext vom Verlag; nicht vom SfBS bearbeitet. Dieses Buch ist der Versuch, das Wunder der Sprache zu verstehen. Einblicke in das Werden der Sprache beim Kind bilden den faszinierendsten und schönsten Zugang zum Wesen der Sprache - und des mit der Sprache begabten Menschen. Sprache wird hier nicht (wovor schon Wilhelm von Humboldt warnte) »wie...

Something is profoundly wrong with the way English (and other foreign languages) are taught at German lower secondary and comprehensive schools. There is statistical evidence (low test scores in nationwide tests) as well as rich anecdotal evidence (mostly collected from retrospective self-reports) to support my claim. The article attempts to explai...

All the praise that is heaped on the classical languages as an educational tool is due in double measure to the mother tongue, which should more justly be called the ‘Mother of Languages’; every new language can only be established by comparison with it…Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 1806If there is another ‘language teaching revolution’ round the co...

About the book The book falls into two parts: (1) How languages are acquired; (2) How foreign languages are (or should be) taught. The first part attempts a novel synthesis of the main types of language acquisition situations: mother-tongue acquisition, second-language acquisition, and foreign-language teaching. General principles of language acqui...

The theoretical basis for pattern drills is the generative principle, i.e. the human capacity to generate an infinite number of utterances from a finite grammatical competence (W.v.Humboldt). Words can be recombined again and again to produce innumerable novel sentences. Teachers have intuitively sensed the importance of the generative principle an...

Practising communication is an important classroom activity, but communication is not everything. Learners must also learn to divide messages into their component parts, otherwise each new message would have to be taken over from others and memorized, in which case there would never be any really new messages. Language only comes into its own when...

The article describes a series of drills which apply the generative principle, i.e. the human capacity to generate an infinite number of utterances from a finite grammatical competence. Traditional pattern drills focused exclusively on the automatization of structures. They were found wanting because fluent sentence variations did not transfer easi...

(1) Mündlichkeit: The ear is the gateway to language. (2) Kommunikation (3) Funktionale Fremdsprachigkeit: The classroom is a slice of life, and both message- and medium-oriented communciation in the foreign language is the all-important context of language development. (4) Üben: Language is a skill, it is acquired by practice; nobody can do practi...

The article is concerned with the use of the mother tongue in bilingual content teaching as well as in conventional foreign language classes. The controversy over the mother tongue as a help or a hindrance is examined by way of an analysis of a history lesson taught in English as a foreign language. The article makes the point that brief episodes o...

The article discusses the methodological concepts of medium- and message oriented communication and applies them to both the conventional foreign language classroom and the bilingual content classroom where school subjects are taught in the medium of a foreign language. It is based on personal classroom observations, mostly in German grammar school...

This book is a collection of classroom phrases, designed to help non-native teachers of German as a foreign language to conduct their lessons in German. It covers a wide range of language-teaching activities and teacher-pupil situations. Even teachers with a good command of German often fail to sound natural and idiomatic in their German lessons. T...

Die Neueren Sprachen 92:1,2 (1993), 151-161. This article sets out to define a number of questions for research with a view to evaluating what has been achieved to date, and to developing and testing teaching materials for courses in school subjects that have not yet been included in bilingual programmes in Germany. What are the presumed or claimed...

This is a review of H. Hammerly: Fluency and Accuracy: toward Balance in Language Teaching and Learning. H. convincingly argues that striving for accuracy can be combined with encouraging authentic communication from the beginning of a course. He also shows that the systematic use of the students' native language can greatly facilitate learning.

This article is intended to help teachers understand and experiment with bilingual pattern practice. It is a detailed step-by-step account of what to do in the classroom, how to embed drill work in communicative teacher talk and how to proceed from medium-orientation to message-orientation. Care has been taken to illustrate how the use of the mothe...

The article has been written for foreign language teachers who enjoy working with dialogues. It is a detailed step by step account of what to do in order to get the pupils to a stage where thy can act out a new dialogue freely and naturally. A key feature is the bilingual sandwich-technique as conceived by C.J.Dodson in Language Teaching and the bi...

Published in Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht 24, Heft 104, Dezember 1990, S. 4-17. Reformers in the second half of the 19th century demanded the radical exclusion of the mother tongue - probably for the first time in the history of foreign language teaching. Since then, the question of whether the mother tongue should be regarded merely as a disru...

This is an attempt to assess the quality of communication in the classroom. The distinction between medium- and message-oriented communication is introduced and is meant to replace earlier distinctions such as manipulation vs. communication, real speech vs. drill speech, skill-getting vs. skill-using activities, rehearsal language vs. performance l...

Various examples of L1 verbal play as exhibited by children from two to five in both autistic and communicative situations are given. It is argued that (1) through verbal play the child provides himself with training phases necessary for developing and consolidating new verbal skills, and that (2) verbal play is mainly semantic play. The form serve...

Considers the need for meaningfulness in people's impressions of their experiences and discusses this need as it appears in various aspects of foreign language teaching. Discusses learners' failure to learn foreign vocabulary as taught monolingually and learners' resistance to correction. Explains the behaviorist psychology terms "set" and "attitud...

Discusses materials developed in a class of 11-year-old children beginning English at a German high school. The materials are not based on artificial situations, but on real situations in the students' own classroom. (CFM)

A 6th-grade test in English as a foreign language is described and contrasted with second language acquisition by the children of foreign laborers in Germany. The latter calls for special teaching procedures; tests and tapes are described. The teacher's "feel" is considered more important than "scientific" methodology. (IFS/WGA)

Examines the trend in Germany, away from a strict avoidance of the mother tongue in second language instruction. (AM)

(1977)"Semantik und Semantisierung". Linguistik und Didaktik 30, 101-118. 1. Einleitung Eine in der Fremdsprachendidaktik häufig verwendete Argumentationskette lautet: 1. Sprachen sind keine Nomenklaturen oder Etikettensammlungen für die Dinge der Welt. Sprachen haben weltbildende Kraft. Sie ordnen Welt auf je eigene unverwechselbare Weise und k...

Medium-oriented communcation refers mainly to teacher-guided communication, aimed at practising / explaining language and revealing the progress of language learning. Message-oriented communication refers to all other speech intentions, in and outside the classroom. Suggestions are given for stimulating spontaneous message-orientation. (Text is in...

1967 saw the publication of C. J. Dodson’s groundbreaking work, Language teaching and the bilingual method. In it, Dodson presented a new bilingual method, which was a frontal attack on the traditional ban on the mother tongue, conceived on the basis of a series of controlled experiments on teaching. Dodson’s work inspired researchers from various...

Vorbemerkung Im Fremdsprachenunterricht wie im bilingualen Sachunterricht gilt das Prinzip der funktionalen Fremdsprachigkeit: Die Fremdsprache ist Unterrichtssprache, Vermittlungssprache, Arbeitssprache. Die fremde Sprache darf nicht nur Lehrgegenstand sein, ist nicht nur das Ziel, sondern auch der Weg zum Ziel. Sie muß von Anfang an auch als voll...