What does foreign language teaching mean today?
Because society has such high expectations with regard to the command of English, how it is taught is watched with eagle-eyes. [more]
From the Garden of Eden via Babylon to Whitsun
Holiday at the seaside. Six- to eight-year-olds are playing on the beach. Two are French, one is Dutch, two German; an Italian joins them. What language do they speak? Each one their own. What language do they hear and understand? All the others. They understand one another because they still experience something of the universal language of feelings, the will and the body in their common play. When in the evening one of the mothers asks: “Does Hans have any brothers and sisters? Where in Germany does he live? How long is he staying here?”, the child will not be able to answer. He does not know. The language of feelings does not deal in retrievable information. It is process, it lives in doing. [more]
How to turn vocabulary into language
Let us start with an extended vocabulary exercise in a middle school class. The pupils and teacher stand in a circle along the walls of the classroom. The teacher gives the pupil next to her in the circle an object, a ball for example, which she turns into a banana through a peeling motion. Everyone who knows, calls out “banana!” (or the corresponding word in the respective target language). The girl next to the teacher knows that she in turn has to turn the “banana” into something else. She makes cleaning movements across her shoes with the ball and individual children call out “shoe brush!” while others only just remember it at that particular moment or perhaps hear it for the first time. It is an exercise which allows pupils at all language levels to be involved. [more]
Creative writing in class – for pupils and teachers
Creative writing has aesthetic motives. It is not concerned so much with facts as, rather, with the imaginative representation of emotions, events, characters and experiences. In doing so, the rules of language are stretched to breaking point, it is tested as to how far it can be driven before it collapses under the pressure of innovation and new ideas. And it is a very personal matter. [more]
Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen e.V.