I have been thinking a lot about language lately. I expected to speak more in German in my German grad course and I am noticing that I am not. I only took a few graduate courses taught in German, my graduate training was all in the United States, and 99% of what I read for academic purposes is in English. Hence, talking about something related to my field in German does not come natural to me. Of course, I already new that, which is why I was so excited about teaching a graduate course for just German students. For the same reason I also went on a shopping trip to the university book store in Freiburg last year. I bought several textbooks for courses that I could potentially teach. Unfortunately I have not had time to read them. But I also bought a book called "Statistik fuer Sprachwissenschaftler" this is turning out to be a good one. Because it teaches me both the English and the German terms, teaches me R, and teaches me statistics. So, I am accomplishing three goals at the price of one. And after finishing the first chapter, I am quite happy with my choice. We shall see how long I can make it. Since my TV will not make the digital revolution, I should have more time soon.
Another thing about language is my son. We raise him bilingually and I started noticing that his English is starting to be more dominant again. This makes me really scared about next year when he goes to daycare full-time. Today he was the star in Gelika's Teaching Methods course. The topic was bilingual education. The whole family served as guest speakers for Gelika and her 33 friends. Benni did awesome, I thought. The students asked a lot of interesting questions. This made me even more aware of the fact that this bilingual thing will be an uphill battle. I really would love for him to be comfortable in both languages in as many situations as possible. It would be great if he could experience school in both places and languages. I want him to be an even better bilingual than me. I know, we parents, have so many unrealistic expectations. But, hey, all I can do is try, right?
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I think about language, and who uses what language, and to whom, every day. Therefore, this is probably going to be an extraordinarily long comment.
ReplyDeleteOn German: My office is near that of many of the German TAs. Based on the extremely reliable method of listening to people through walls and in hallways, I find the patterns interesting, as almost none of them speak German to each other. Even when two native speakers are interacting, they usually use English-German code-switching. I don't find that odd, or native English speakers using English together odd, since we are in the US, but I do wonder why the non-native speakers don't push the native speakers to speak German with them, as this is my personal strategy with Arabic, as how else am I going to get practice. Actually, my personal strategy has evolved to code-switch between Arabic and English for those people whom it's difficult to get to talk to me in Arabic, code-switching on my part makes them use Arabic more for some reason. I could comment on this subject a lot more, but I'm going to stop.
More generally: I used to be in an Arabic PhD program, and I transferred here, and one of the reasons was that my graduate classes were in English, not Arabic. I found this infuriating, as I wanted to use Arabic. While many of the professors were more familiar with their subjects in English, having studied in the US, I felt that it was their duty to to give me lots of practice in Arabic, since I was also taking these courses to practice my language skills, and where else was I going to do it? I do sometimes regret that I did not transfer to a program that does its courses in Arabic (there is one, and it was a hard decision). So, I think trying to do more of the course in German would be great, and hopefully your students will appreciate it too.
On bilingual children: Being engaged to an English speaker, I'm working to convince him that we need to live abroad so our children will be bilingual, since with both of us speaking English it will only happen if the other language has community value. He pointed out that in his opinion, it was unfortunate that I knew so much about bilingualism, because if I was like most Americans I'd be happy just sending my kid to after-school language classes twice a week. But I think he'll come around.
First and foremost: congratulations on your engagement!!!! Very exciting.
ReplyDeleteI think your observation is very true at this university and many others in the country. When I came to this university I was also surprised that faculty meetings were in English. I am the only NS of German on current teaching faculty. And I don't even really count anymore because I have been her so long. But it is hard to do things, that you are so used to doing in English, in German. It is hard to talk about texts written in English in German. I am trying very hard, but I have a long way to go before it becomes natural to teach non-language courses in English, in part because my non-language courses normally are LLT courses, i.e. not for German speakers alone. Thanks for the encouragement and for sharing your experience in a non-Arabic speaking Arabic graduate program. That is a very valuable perspective.