Mid-Course at Göethe Institut

Due to popular demand, I will add one more update to the adventures of an American ESL instructor as a language learner here. The course ends on the 26th, a week and a half from now, and then I´ll be on the road with a Eurailpass and out of touch aside from an occasional visit to an Internet cafe.

As the days go on I get to know my classmates better, as well as more of the other students through after-class activities such as the weekly "Göethetreff" at a local beerhall. There appears to be only one student older than myself in the summer sessions, a historian from Ireland who studies in the highest level and discusses German history with me sometimes in that language. Most of the rest of the students are in their early twenties, with a few professional people in their thirties. Sometimes I forget when we´re hanging out together after class that most of them are easily young enough to be my sons or daughters!

A couple of weeks into the routine, some of the students have taken on the characteristics we´d associate with ESL students in the U.S. They miss class altogether or come in quite late, and often don´t turn in the writing assignments. The lower levels have the largest number of young American students, who in particular seem to spend much of the break times and after-class activities talking with each other in English.

A couple dozen of us took a chartered bus trip to Prague last weekend, where much more English than German was heard. I had the good fortune to meet a nice lady from Burma who works as a German teacher there, and plans to help start a Göethe Institut in her home country. It was interesting to spend time with someone from such a different background who speaks the target language better than I do! I roomed with a French businessman who studies in a lower level, and found myself serving as something of a German teacher to him as well.

The class´s regular instructor had a planned absence for two days, and the substitute was an older lady with a rather different teaching style. The regular instructor jumps around the book, gives us a lot of extra worksheets, and changes activities frequently... to the point that I´m sometimes not sure what we´re doing and feel that we´re not really covering any one thing adequately. That might be just a characteristic of such an intensive course, though. The class time seemed to pass more slowly with the substitute, but I found her more deliberate style easier to follow. She pretty much followed the book--which is so full of exercises that one wonders what need there is for the extra worksheets anyway--and encouraged us to use sample structures in short conversations.

Comparing the two styles, I´d say the regular instructor is more entertaining and leaves the students little choice but to engage. The substitute´s more cerebral style, however, worked just as well for me and would probably work for anyone who is more interested in learning than in being entertained. I´m the class´s designated "Can we also say it this way?" questioner, which seems to throw the regular instructor´s rhythm off slightly. The substitute appeared more receptive to taking slight diversions into the various ways of joining phrases through conjunctions to express a thought most succinctly.

All in all, I´m getting a firsthand confirmation of things I´d always surmised. To a great extent, a language course is a language course. Success has less to do with the materials or even with the teacher--as long as s/he is willing to clarify and elaborate--than with the desire of the individual student to learn and to build on that learning through use of the language as much as possible outside of class.