Lumpi ist mein Hund: German for no particular purpose

I’ve just been preparing for an EAP event in Zürich on 27 September and it got me thinking about my own experiences of learning German; not altogether successfully.

My first contact with German was at secondary school where I studied it for a year around the age of 13. This was back in the days of the audio lingual method and we used a course called Vorwärts which involved watching a slideshow about an apparently typical German family, the Schaudis, and their supposed day-to-day life. We watched the slides, listened to the audio (presumably on tape) then repeated. It was successful in the sense that I can still remember many of the sentences we learnt verbatim to this day. Unfortunately, they weren’t always particularly useful - here’s a selection of the ones that stick in my mind (apologies for the spelling, as far as I remember, we only drilled them orally):

Der Hase ist tot. (The rabbit is dead.)
Hilfe, hilfe, mein Bein ist gebrochen. Hast du eine Hansaplast?
(Help, help, my leg is broken. Have you got a sticking plaster?)

After a bit of googling, I found somewhat of a cult following for the Schaudi family – Mr and Mrs Schaudi, their son Hans, his ‘friend’ Lieselotte and not forgetting Lumpi the dog - which has backed up many of my recollections of the slightly obscure language input - although not admittedly the bit about the plaster!

Some years later, when I finished university, I spent 6 months in Basel working as an au pair and thought I’d better try and learn something more useful, so I enrolled for weekly German classes at the local Micros Klubschule. I really enjoyed the classes. There was a fascinating mix of different nationalities and we had a really nice young teacher. Looking back, he did a fantastic job with such a diverse mix of complete beginners and was actually part of my inspiration for becoming a language teacher in the first place. And from what I remember of the course, I think it was mostly useful stuff, with lots of basic everyday phrases and vocabulary.

The only slight drawback was that the course taught High German (standard German, if you like, as spoken in Germany), but the language I was surrounded by in Basel was mostly Swiss German, a different dialect with a very different accent and quite a few completely different words and phrases. This was quite confusing, especially because, as a beginner, I had no feel for what was High German and what was Swiss German, so I ended up speaking a rather odd mix of the two. This didn’t matter too much while I was in Switzerland as people mostly got the gist of what I was trying to say (albeit at a very basic level). However, when, at the end of my stay, I travelled back through Germany, I got quite a different reaction. Some people just looked at me a bit puzzled and took a while to work out what I wanted, but I remember one guy in a cafe who couldn’t quite suppress a giggle. I don’t think he was being mean, but clearly my dodgy accent and odd hybrid dialect did just sound rather comical. As a result, it was many many years before I risked speaking even a few words of German in public again.

The point being that for any language learner it’s important to understand what they’re learning, why and how they can use it. In English for Academic Purposes (EAP), the purpose, as the name suggests, should be obvious, but that isn’t always the case. Over the past 10 years of working in EAP as a teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer, I’ve discovered that different students, teachers and institutions can all have quite different expectations about what learning academic English should involve. And when students’ expectations don’t seem to match what they’re being taught, they easily become demotivated and disenchanted, switching off at best and at worst, being openly hostile.

In my session in Zürich, I’ll be talking about how we can deal with students’ expectations and keep them on side by making the rationale for what we do in class clearer; by explaining to students exactly what we’re doing, why and how it fits in with their own academic studies.

I’m looking forward to visiting Zürich, meeting teachers and finding out what teaching EAP in Switzerland is like. You never know, I might even be brave enough to try out a little bit of German …

If you’re in the area and would like to come along, you can find out more information and register for the event here (it’s free, you just need to sign up).

Thinking about academic lexicons

Last weekend I was in Frankfurt for an EAP Day organized by OUP and ELTAF. The teachers were a mix of those already involved in EAP and those just interested to find out about it, but all were happy to join in and ask questions, even when I plunged them straight into EAP activities first thing on a Saturday morning!

One of the sessions was on EAP vocabulary and as I’ve done before, I started off by asking everyone to write a single word on a blank card that they thought of as typically academic.

In the workshop, I talked about the three categories of vocabulary needed by EAP students developing their own academic lexicon:

- general vocabulary: words in the top 2000 most frequent words in the language, but with a special focus on those apparently common words which have more specific academic uses (table, find, string, etc.)

- core academic vocabulary: as per the Academic Word List

- specialist vocabulary: especially terms used in specific academic disciplines

So how did the teacher’s intuitions about academic vocabulary match up to these different areas?

36% of the words chosen were Top 2000 words. Many clearly fitted into the category of words that are useful in an academic context and have slightly different everyday and academic senses, such as critical, examine and practice. Critical (and criticize and critique) came out as part of the discussion we had about subtly different academic uses. Notice the difference between these two definitions from a general learner’s dictionary (OALD) and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English:

OALD: critical adj: expressing disapproval of sb/sth and saying what you think is bad about them

OLDAE: critical adj: involving making fair, careful judgements about the good and bad qualities of sb/sth

Another 36% of the words chosen by teachers were on the Academic Word List, so solid core academic vocabulary, like significant, criteria, data, assessment and thesis.

The remaining 28% were words which don’t fall into either of the other two categories. Some of these – purport and construe – were clearly very formal and potentially academic in register (both appear in OLDAE), but just not frequent enough to make it onto the AWL. The others form an interesting little group which I may have to consider adding into my workshop next time I give it, and that’s what could be described as words that students won’t actually use in their academic writing, but need to talk about studying. So there were words like dissertation which are about academic study generally (you could add seminar, tutorial, deadline, extension, plagiarism, etc.) and also linguistic metalanguage, such as collocation – the essential terminology you need to talk about language learning (you could add register, hedging, clause, etc.)

To get to this breakdown, I used the Vocabulary Profiler on the Lextutor website, which picks out AWL words and classifies the remainder in terms of frequency. It’s a really useful (free) tool which I gave a demo of in the workshop. I know though that when I've shown it in the past, teachers have come back to me afterwards and said they couldn’t get it to do what I’d shown them. Because the website has so many different tools available, it can be a bit difficult to navigate if you’re not familiar with it. The following link will take you straight to the AWL highlighter tool: http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/ I’ve also put together a short demo:

At the end of the session, I asked everyone to go back to their cards and to classify the word they’d noted down at the start into one of the three groups. 57% of people classified their words correctly, although to be fair, several others chose words which arguably ought to be on the AWL but aren’t!

Thanks to everyone who came for such an enjoyable and stimulating day, I hope you all went away with some food for thought.

 

EAP: A PARSNIP-free zone?

I’ve just been putting together a talk about academic vocabulary for an EAP event at London South Bank University next Saturday (31 May).

I’m going to be talking about ways of exploring vocabulary in EAP that go beyond just lists of words. I’ll be looking at the familiar topic of collocation, but giving it an academic / discipline-specific slant. I’ll also be talking about register, authentic texts and issues around marked language. But the topic that’s really sparked my interest as I’ve been preparing for the talk has been the concept of connotation and how students need to learn to tread very carefully with vocabulary choices when they’re writing about sensitive topics.

Connotation doesn’t often get much coverage in general ELT materials. In some advanced coursebooks, you’ll perhaps get something about the distinction between slim (approving) and skinny (traditionally disapproving, although I wonder if we’ll find that changing with the advent of skinny jeans?!).  But it rarely goes much further than that. I think one of the main reasons being that connotation, all the cultural and social baggage that words carry with them, really comes into its own when we get onto talking about more sensitive topics where we need to tread carefully in our language choices. And of course, these are the very topics that materials published for a global ELT market avoid so as not to offend their potential customers – I’m sure many of you will have come across the classic PARSNIP* acronym for topics to steer clear of.

In EAP though, these are often the very topics that our students, especially in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences will be reading and writing about. I trawled back through the titles of essays written by my own pre-sessional students over the years and found the following topics:

•       Security or Segregation: Is UK Immigration Policy Toward Third World Immigrants Unfair? (Law)

•       Problems in intercultural relationships between Russia and the EU (Politics)

•       Wife abuse and its psychological effects on abused women (Psychology)

•       Discussion of the rainbow zone in British cinema—from homosexual to queer (Film Studies)

•       What kinds of problems may limit the value of Mental Health Review Tribunals? (Law)

It was actually this last one, from a Chinese law student, which first really got me thinking about connotation and the issue of sensitive language.  Throughout the first draft of her essay, she referred to how the legal system deals with “mental patients”. I winced slightly every time I came across the phrase and in my feedback, I suggested she change it to “patients with mental health problems”. In her tutorial though, she questioned why she should change something so simple and concise to something more awkward and unwieldy. Good point and not an easy one to explain!

The final part of my talk on Saturday will go into my answer and how this translated into materials and activities exploring connotation and sensitive language a few years later when I was working on Oxford EAP Advanced.

If you’re based in or near London and want to come along to find out more, then the event is free, but you’ll need to register here in advance.

* PARSNIP: stands for Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, Isms (racism, sexism, etc.) and Pork