Could you steer me to standard German texts...

[English-test.net]

Torsten --

Could you steer me to standard German texts on second language learning theory, particularly as it relates to foreigners learning German? I seach and search around Amazon.de, but apparently I don't know the right "Stickw?rter" to use. I'm still poking around for material on problems that English speakers have when learning other languages. Just some titles would get me started.

Any help would be appreciated, although you are still appreciated even if you don't help me. ;-)

Jamie

[English-test.net]

Torsten --

Thanks for the info to get me started. The file you sent came MIME encoded, so when I tried to open it, I just got computer code. If you can send it as a zipped file, or something like that, then that would probably work. The information in your e-mail was VERY helpful though. All I have to do is go to Amazon, save one of the books to my "shopping cart", and the site recommends another one. What's missing, though, seems to be professional books for teachers and linguists. If I were to search the term "second language acquisition" in German, which German words would I use?

Maybe, the attached file could be a start – it’s a sample of a book on second language learning by Vera Birkenbihl who is German and most of her publications are in German (with some execptions such as this particular book).

Du vergi?t vielleicht, da? ich deutsch lesen kann und da? ich etwa regelm?ig deutsche B?cher lese.

She has written other books on how to learn a second laguage in German but these books focus on German readers wanting to learn English or another language.

That's okay too.

I’ll think of other recourses and will forward anything I come up with…

Thank you.

Jamie

[English-test.net]

Torsten --

Thank you for all the search words. Some of them were things I had thought of, but most of them were not. I'll try them. By coincidence, I had also found that the Hueber Verlag has a lot of professional papers for free download.

That PDF file came MIME encoded again, and I'm thinking that your e-mail software must be set to encode things that way and that my service isn't decoding it. One of my sisters had the same problem with Outlook Express, until I fixed it.

It's pretty funny how I happened to look at the Hueber site. I often study from textbooks that I find amusing. I don't mean textbooks that are meant to be amusing, but ones that are so archaic or misconceived, or so saturated with some ideology or other that they are funny. This is similar to the way many Americans (including me) enjoy watching old movies that are now almost unbearably corny. I like textbooks from the Soviet era for learning Russian, because they are full of all kinds of communist kitsch. I have one in which the first sentence taught is, "This is a machine tool." There are reading texts about commune workers ecstatically taking in the harvest, and all kinds of things that are funny -- if you didn't have to grow up under that system. The German one I find funny is called "Deutsch 2000", and it's from the Hueber Verlag. It was written in the 1970s to be as futuristic as possible, which means that in the year 2003, parts of it can be extremely funny. There is one lesson where someone seriously claims he is "ein moderner Mann" because he only gets two haircuts a year. Some of the drill sentences are things like, "Das ist ein Wankelmotor," and this Wankel engine -- which in the 1970s was believed to be the engine of the future -- keeps reappearing all over the book. I found out at some point that there were some audiolingual tapes to go with this series, but now I see that not even Hueber has them anymore.

Thanks for all your help. I'll now set about looking for the things I need.

Jamie

[English-test.net]

Thanks, Torsten. I got to the URL, and the file is downloading just fine. You've really helped me.

As for textbooks – I can imagine how amusing it is to read them now that the situation has changed dramatically but even with so called modern course books I think they are old fashioned the very moment they get in the stores for several reasons.

A friend of mine in Switzerland was really angry because her school had switched over to one of those Oxford or Cambridge ESL books that are full of music stars and other things that go out of fashion very fast. It's a great marketing ploy by the publishers, because the books will get old in two or three years, rather than in seven or eight. In fact, if you try to use them with two successive waves of high school kids, the second wave probably won't know who half the people are. Of course, the regular books have an occasional problem with that. I remember teaching in Europe from a Cambridge book, in which the students were expected to recognize people who had been famous outside the UK for only about two weeks, if at all.

This is why I often prefer to use authentic up to date materials from the internet or newspapers.

After I had worked my way through a Czech grammar book or two, that is ALL I learned Czech from when I was there, until I got good enough to use the grammar books intended for Czech school kids. Pedagogical materials just didn't have the day-to-day expressions I needed to know, but Tom & Jerry did. I also found that it accelerated my vocabulary acquisition a lot if I read news articles about events I was already well-informed about in English.

Especially with German language books you won’t find something up to date. We recently have used the ‘Themen’ and ‘Dialog’ series by Hueber and none of the texts were really up to date…

People here teaching classes to corporate employees generally use Themen Neu or Dialog Beruf. In the high schools and colleges they use books from American publishers that can be pretty deadly and do not use up-to-date methods, no matter how new they are. I don't know why school systems stick to this stuff, except that American teachers are unusually lazy, and it's impossible to get many of them to learn any new methods, let alone basic computer skills.

With ESL books there's an added problem, because the publishers of all textbooks here cater to what are called "textbook adoption states", such as California and Texas. In those states, a committee selects the textbooks for every school in the state, so if the book doesn't meet the specific needs of students in that state, or if it offends somebody on the committee due to its political or social content, the publisher will lose the business for the entire state throughout the textbook life cycle. In Michigan, where I live, the towns or the individual schools select the textbooks themselves, so the stakes are not so high. The result is that we in Michigan, and in many other states, have to use books that are specific to California. The ESL pronounciation books deal with the problems of the main immigrant groups to California -- Hispanics and East Asians -- and they more or less ignore the problems of the Germans, East Europeans and Middle Easterners who come here to the Midwest or to the Northeast. In the stories, everybody is in California, and the situations are sometimes specific to California, even if the book doesn't actually say that that is the location of the stories.

So, picking textbooks is tough all over.

Jamie

[Sany]

warum willst du deutsch lernen? why would you like to learn german on earth?

[Torsten]

That's a good question. Learning German is almost like learning Latin these days. Nobody seems to speak it anymore. Not even the Germans :-).

TOEIC short conversations: An airline customer wants to change his flight