One teacher’s methodological journey

This is a lengthy guest blog, which teacher Casey Creel kindly sent me. It’s the transcript of an interview she carried out with Dave Limburg, a professor of modern foreign languages at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Dave has self-published two of his own textbooks as well as a German grammar overview. He also coordinates the Munich study abroad semester and the German club and the conversation club Stammtisch. I am publishing the transcript more or less verbatim. It’s interesting to see one teacher’s journey from a very traditional grammar-translation approach to something more communicative.

Casey: Hi Dave

Dave: Hey, how are you?

Casey: Good, I’m in the middle of report writing, but I’m otherwise good.

Did you learn any foreign languages before you went to university?

Dave: Yes, my family took us to Heidelberg when I was 8 so I learned German there for about two months. It made a big impression, even if it was short. Later my siblings and I took German lessons from a family friend in South Dakota, and I took German in high school too.

Casey: What was that like?

Dave: It was a bad experience.

Casey: (Laughs) 

Dave: The high school German teacher I had in Minnesota had basically zero interest in teaching us and I remember not getting anything out of it at all. 

Casey: Wow, you mean he was personally just uninvested in your learning, or what?

Dave: Totally, I think he didn’t like teaching and didn’t like being there. I was the kind of student who stayed quiet in the back of the room so it didn’t matter that I already knew some German. Soin those two years I remember learning basically nothing.

Casey: Wow. So your foreign language programme was only two years long. Did it ever bother you that as an American you were never made to learn French or Spanish along the way, starting in an earlier grade?

Dave: I remember in junior high we had a mini-course of a couple weeks with an introduction to French and Spanish together, but that was it.

Casey: Wow, so little! So then you got to university and you started studying German immediately?

Dave: So here’s what happened, I went to Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I first grew up, after returning from Minnesota. I just started taking German, since I had the feeling that I had a link and a personal interest in German and Germany. But the biggest reason was because the college had a curricular requirement that I take either a foreign language or math. And I hated math. So it was an easy decision to take German. But I had no intention to major in it and didn’t know I would take it for more than a year.

Casey: So you’re 18 and you have some prior knowledge of German and you take Semester 1. What was that like?

Dave: So there were two college professors, Gerhard Schmutterer and Reuben Peterson, whose wife was actually that private teacher I mentioned earlier, and it was those two guys who encouraged me to continue with German. I never planned to major in it but I liked it and they kept me going. Those two teachers really helped students enjoy German, and not just me but everyone in the class. Having said that, their methods were old school. I think that at least one of them, Reuben, who was younger, would have probably taught more progressively if the methods had been known, but he wasn’t in the right environment. So we did things in class that were interesting and fun for us, but we didn’t improve our German. I always tell the story that by my senior year I went with a bunch of friends to Germany on what was called an ‘interim’ to visit my parents who were on a sabbatical in Germany [Dave’s father was a professor of theology], and everyone thought, ‘Oh, here’s Dave, the big German major’ and I opened my mouth to speak and I couldn’t say anything, I literally couldn’t say a word when I was over there. And I hadn’t really thought it through, you know, preparing what I was going to say, so I realised that I couldn’t speak at all. In class we never practised speaking. 

Casey: Zero?

Dave: You can’t say zero because we did do some canned responses now and then, we’d answer questions from the book, maybe, so maybe my pronunciation was okay, but I could not sit down and have a conversation.

Casey: But you liked these teachers and these classes nonetheless. And you must have learned something. 

Dave: Well, what I was learning was kind of a focus on grammar, and translating, which I now think is a really wrong approach, to begin with translating. I tell my students that translating is the last thing to learn, i.e. when you’ve finished your undergraduate and maybe even not until you’ve started some graduate-level studies should you try to translate full texts from German to English or the other way around. Translating has more in common with art than with the raw skills that most intermediate students have, I think. 

So we did a lot of that stuff, but it was just fun to be in a foreign language class, given my own interest and my time in Germany – for example I had been in on a trip to Germany in high school with the school marching band – and since it was a way to connect culturally and to keep those experiences going. So that kept me going. But none of us knew that we weren’t learning to retain, but instead for tests. Even with grammar – by time I got to grad school I realised I had to relearn a lot of it since so little of it had stuck.

Casey: So for me that begs the question, what were these professors training you to do exactly, or were they just improvising? I mean it sounds like you can’t even quite say they were preparing you for graduate studies in literature, but was that their own background? What was their mission?

Dave: Well for the older guy, who was a native German speaker – Gerhard Schmutterer – he loved imparting German culture and would have us read these snippets of great literary texts. By the way I totally disagree with this and I would never do this with my students, because of my experience. What I got out of these excerpts of literature at the time was absolutely nothing. I remember there was a book with a page from Goethe’s Faust and two pages of Lessing and so on and so forth, and you have no context as to what those works are about. The professor would tell us in English what they were about, and then we would read it, and we would be so uninterested in it and not engaged in the story since we were only reading a tiny part of it. 

But to answer your question, I think both teachers both believed, along with everyone else at the time, that they were doing all they could to teach German well. I think people just hadn’t figured it out yet.

Casey: Were the students complaining about the class, were they miserable?

Dave: No, not at all. But their teachers just hadn’t figured out a method to actually teach German in a lasting way. Fortunately, right when I was starting grad school, that method – I would say it had just started – had begun to float around. It was called the communicative method.

Casey: When was the first time you trained to teach other students in German, was it during your PhD?

Dave: Yes, so I had an undergraduate degree in German, then I went to Alaska with a friend for half a year to work, and had no idea that I would end up in grad school, nor what to do with my degree in languages (English and German). After half a year of working in Alaska my friend and I looked at each other and realised, we have got to get back to school.

Casey: Really.

Dave: Yeah, we loved Alaska but working 9 to 5 was just not for us. It wasn’t hard work, by the way, he was a bank teller and I worked maintenance for the Anchorage Daily News while delivering pizza at night. So it wasn’t like we were throwing frozen fish onto a boat or anything like that. But we knew that we were still students who needed to get back into things. So when I got to grad school I had never thought of teaching and had never taken any education classes, but in America as you know the grad students often teach the undergraduate classes at the lower levels. So we had one week – one week – of teacher training as TA’s (teaching assistants) before the semester started. And then we were all responsible for teaching a full-scale college course by ourselves with no assistance, well, maybe with some weekly or biweekly meetings outside of class with the TA coordinator.

Casey: Wow.

Dave: Yeah. So here’s the great thing that I always told my wife Laura, whom I met around that time, and that I maybe would have admitted to my family too, but no one else: I was always about a week ahead of the beginner students in terms of my own knowledge of the curriculum. In other words my own German was perpetually a week ahead – two weeks max – of theirs. That’s certainly how it felt.

Casey: Is that because the curriculum you were using emphasised communication and your own communication was really weak?

Dave: Well, also my grammar, too – it just really wasn’t there, I’d been exposed to it for four years but when I was an undergraduate I was really only learning it to score well on tests. Almost none of it had stuck. We had also had lists of vocabulary to learn – which I also don’t do now as a teacher. It must sound like I’m so against my own college experience when I say that, but I'm not at all: I just don't use the methods my teachers did back then, because I realized later I hadn't learned German the way I wanted my students to learn it. And mind you, that’s not to say that I was unhappy in college learning German.

Casey: You studied for tests and got a good grade and that was good enough.

Dave: Yeah, and by the way the vocabulary lists were even alphabetised. So absolutely without context, and we were supposed to learn them for a test. Of course none of it sunk in.

Casey: Were they at least organised around a topic?

Dave: Yeah, so we had a book with a story, a little canned story with a picture and a list of vocabulary from the story. I remember nothing about the story, they weren’t real and now I can only remember some of the strange words that stuck in my head for some reason. So clearly those methods hadn’t worked for me. So as a grad student I felt that in terms of grammar, vocabulary and speaking, I was really only a tiny bit ahead of my own beginner students given what the curriculum was asking them to do. 

Casey: Now I feel compelled to ask who these students were – you were at Ohio State university at the time, you’re maybe 24 years old and you’re teaching 18 and 19 year-olds. Were they there just to fulfil a curricular requirement?

Dave: Most of them, yeah. Some of them probably had a real interest in German, and maybe some of them ended up majoring in it. A funny aside is that a couple of years ago at Guilford I had a student, June Williams, in my beginner German class, who told me that her dad Jeff had been my student at Ohio State. 

Casey: That’s how you know you’re old!

Dave: Yeah, I know. But with those students I remember feeling like such a fake. This big poser, pretending he has authority and knew all this stuff. But I really was committed to the job. And there’s something I ask my students every year: what’s the best possible way to learn anything? They always give all these different answers but they never guess the one I have in mind, which is  through teaching. I learned that teaching something is the absolute best way to learn something, being forced to teach it. If you’re at all conscientious and want to a do a good job, you have to know your stuff and understand it. It was very nerve-wracking that first year until I started getting into a groove.

Casey: So the number one person learning German in your first German classes was you yourself (laughs).

Dave: Yeah, I was learning really well! Of course I had the basis underneath me of all of that exposure during college. Things were coming back to me, so of course under those circumstances I was a quick learner. So even without knowing all the elements of the German curriculum as I went into teach them, I was able to pick them up step by step. 

Casey: So in hindsight do you admire Ohio State for updating its curriculum to involve more communication?

Dave: Absolutely, and I think most probably other colleges and universities were reforming things as well at that point, but probably not all of them. It seemed like the beginning of a movement, with new books coming out advertising a communicative approach. I remember one of them was Kontakte. So we started using that book. And we had this TA coordinator who was very much into that approach and who got us all excited about it, her name was Kathryn Corl, and she was very good at understanding and communicating that approach, so that was a huge help.

Casey: So in other words you didn’t get a lot of direct training or time in the middle of the school year to fine-tune your own practice, but at least you saw somebody who made a good case for that kind of teaching.

Dave: Yes.

Casey: I have lots of questions about how you developed your methods. So you were in this position of having these students and wanting them to like you and to learn well, but you yourself were in over your head as to determining ‘which’ German was the right German to teach them for their needs, so how did you arrive at teaching speaking so heavily? Was it already true when you were just getting started that speaking was being afforded a greater importance in the beginner semesters than writing or reading?

Dave: Yes, absolutely for the beginning level. That is what we were responsible for teaching in the first semester. After a few years I started teaching beyond pure beginners, but initially I only had beginners. So by the third level of German we had begun having students read literature, like Der Besuch der alten Dame, over several weeks. But before that point it was really about speaking. And I remember what really helped me, beyond having a really talented TA coordinator and lots of other TA’s who were great peers, doing the same thing in the same boat, was this idea that I absolutely did not want to teach the way I had learned. That was so motivating. I don’t want to put down my teachers, but that’s how it is. There is this great snippet by this poet Arnfrid Astel from Munich, who died just recently, who had these great short pieces called Fünfzehn Lektionen zurSchulweisheit, and one of them was ‘Hüpfend ein Schulkind nach Hause. So eine Lehrerin möchteich auch sein.’ In other words, what kind of teacher do you have to be so that your student skips all the way home after class? That was one motivation. The other one was ‘Ich hatte schlechte Lehrer. Das war eine gute Schule.’ So I didn't have bad professors, they taught me and inspired me to learn. But you can also be inspired to think about teaching methods that did not end up not working well.

Casey: (Laughs) 

Dave: That really motivated me to stand in front of the students, think on the first day how to get my students to like me, realising that they’re not going to like me if I’m boring them to death, or if they think my class is just lame –

Casey: Or if you’re masking all of your uncertainties with some sort of arrogance or distance – 

Dave: Exactly. So I wanted them A) to be happy and to skip home and B) to like me. And I knew that the thing that was going to be fun and interesting for them would be if they could speak German. I mean, why else were they there? They want to speak the language in the beginning, it’s the main thing for them! So on the fly, as I went, inspired by the community, I tried to develop my own ways, as much as possible, to get students to speak as much as possible.

Casey: So that was your main goal early on. And were the other TA’s on the same page as you, was there a healthy kind of learning from each other? 

Dave: Yes, for sure. Everyone was trying to do the same thing. And believe it or not, such a simple idea that is just taken for granted now was at the time absolutely new and creative and innovative, and that was the idea of telling students, ‘let’s break into small groups.’ How many times did you do that at Guilford?

Casey: Maybe every lesson.

Dave: Right, every day. But that was brand new! We never did that at my college, we sat in rows and responded to the teacher. We never got into groups to discuss something. That was a key development because if you think about it, no, you cannot have students focused on you for the whole lesson and still get lots of practice, it’s just not possible, it’s not logical.  

Casey: No, you’ve got to multiply it. 

Dave: Yes – the classroom has to be broken up. And you have to figure out the mechanics of it, you can’t just say ‘here are the groups, I’ll see you later, speak German with each other’. You really have to get good at giving them interesting, motivating things to do and to talk about that bring them along.

Casey: Dave, tell me about some of the early materials you used, did you use lots of worksheets, or little sheets of paper, what form did your activities take and what were some of the written tasks that you were giving students?

Dave: Okay, here’s the key – we went from the book, which I don’t do any more, and I’ll explain why in a bit. So we took the book, and I divided my class period by what was in the book, and mind you there were communicative activities in the book. Now here is the big innovation, and by the way that came from the TA coordinator, and that was visuals. What you do is you throw stuff up on the board, various pictures and stuff. I’m teaching in Graz now and I had to bring a whole tub of visuals with me because as you know I need those or I can’t teach. (Laughs) My vocab visuals and pronoun pictures all have magnets on the back, and I attach them to the board, and I’ve got to use them because the idea is, I don’t have to speak English and explain things if I can point instead, and get them to say it, at least for simpler tasks. The visuals help me not to have to do a lot of explaining in English.

Casey: Was that a painful conundrum early on, that you found yourself having to explain things in English and you didn’t want to?

Dave: Yes. That was a big problem: ‘How do we find a way to talk about grammar terms in German?’ None of us even knew all those words when we were TA’s (except for this one guy, who had basically every single German preposition memorised according to case, including ones that none of us had ever heard of), but other than him none of us knew these German grammar terms, but at some point we had to learn them if we wanted to speak correctly. So that was a real problem. But figuring out that you didn’t necessarily have to spend a whole lot of time talking aboutgrammar was this huge, freeing thing. No one wants to hear you talk about grammar anyway. So if I can just show the concept of what a direct object is, without talking about it, it goes over better and it sinks in better to.

Casey: So early on you were thinking of ways to non-verbally illustrate something like indirect objects for the Dative case.

Dave: Yeah.

Casey: Wow. And this was just intuitive to you? Or you begrudgingly realised it worked?

Dave: My method became to show students visuals on the board, and then demonstrate it within the class, so a combination of actions and pictures. I wasn’t afraid to ‘teach’ direct objects and indirect objects, since some students got it that way if I explained it conceptually. That’s the other thing I learned pretty quickly: you have to have several different methods that you’re using at the same time based on the differences in the way people are learning. But I did find out right away that most students – the vast majority – respond to visual cues and illustrations. 

Casey: Tell me about some of these, give me an example.

Dave: Well, they’re all in my little tub here. (Laughs) So I have all the verbs I want students to learn in their first year of German laminated with a magnetic backing, and they’re organised by colour. (I’ve often wondered if I had colour-blind students in the last thirty years of teaching, but no one has ever said anything.) If I can, I also look for an additional way to organise things, like alphabetically or with little symbols to indicate a vowel stem change, etc. I use a colour system to batch verbs that inflect along the same lines in the Perfekt and the Präteritum. Those colours also go from light to dark depending on the alphabet. [For example, Dave uses a blue colour-coding system for the vowel shift of ‘ie’ to ‘o’ as in fliegen → geflogen, but he uses the darker purple for the vowel shift from ‘i’ to ‘u’, as in trinken → getrunken, because the vowel ‘u’ comes later in the alphabet than ‘o’, meriting a darker colour.]

An example of Dave‘s laminated verb cards that constitute some of his classroom visuals. ‘Gehen’ is lavender because the ‘e’ changes to ‘a’ in the perfect tense: gehen → gegangen. All verbs with a vowel shift to ‘a’ are lavender, so a verb like ‘verstehen’ is also a lavender verb. The rectangle at the end is for the Präteritum: the brown colour is for the vowel shift to ‘i’ (gehen →ging). Note that ‘liegen’ has a lavender Präteritum, since the vowel change is also to an ‘a’ (leigen → lag). Finally, the asterisk that is next to ‘gehen’ is used to remind students to use it with ‘sein’ and not with ‘haben’ in the perfect tense. Dave’s idea is that having students not only learn and memorise and hear these patterns, but also see them – see them repeatedly over a variety of classroom and homework activities – helps students inculcate the forms better. 

The colours help but they aren’t the only thing, obviously. They’re just another layer to hook students in with. I think learning things that are grouped in a logical way, that was another principle that I arrived at, compared with the way I learned things in college, like with random, alphabetised lists of words. And the TA coordinator at Ohio State would tell us: ‘You have to contextualise everything’. In fact you could even argue she took that idea a little too far, but I actually think I still follow that basic premise. For example with our tests, she forbade us to ask questions on tests that were not contextualised. You have to give the students a reason, a logical reason in context to answer a question. 

Casey: So you weren’t allowed to ask your students, for example, ‘What is the dative pronoun for third person singular masculine’.

Dave: Exactly! She made us turn it into something like ‘Mein Vater hat Geburtstag und ich schenke ____ (ihm) eine Krawatte’, along those lines. 

Casey: So embed everything, get out of tables and into situations you could use.

Dave: Yes, and that was a good tip!

Casey: Funny, I was asking you about materials and was thinking you would talk about worksheets you designed, and you’re telling me the printed things all came from the book, and the materials, such as they were, were these batched, tactile word cards that showed how the words worked in patterns.

Dave: Yes, but on the point of textbooks, let me add that several of my fellow TA’s and I discovered that using them doesn’t work very well in the classroom.

Casey: (Laughs)

Dave: It became pretty clear pretty fast that those canned things that students are supposed to talk about are just not interesting for them. So I ended up making, and there were a lot of us doing us, little variations on what they were trying to do in the textbook, but personalised for my group of students, linked to the State of Ohio, the university, their lives. So I did use that cancer-causing mimeo machine that you had to spin around to get the carbon nice and loose and flying in the air, making these weird copies before the first copy machines, to supplement the speaking activities in the book, because I didn’t like to use those things that seemed boring. Eventually I started out at Guilford College in North Carolina, using a typical communicative book, and the crazy thing was that by that point I actually asked the publisher if I could order only the grammar section of that book, which of course is the part that lots of teachers today would say is exactly the part you are supposed to focus on the least – because I couldn’t use any of the speaking activities the book suggested, they just weren’t true or relevant to the students’ lives. The publisher agreed and custom-edited the book, and I saved the students money since they now only had to buy a portion of the book, and the rest I made myself.

Casey: Okay, so you mean you used grammar exercises for consolidating at home, that’s what you actually liked the textbook for. But for your classroom you wanted total control yourself.

Dave: Exactly. So it became sort of crazy the way I was using a communicative textbook solely for non-communicative tasks, and even the grammar exercises weren’t the greatest, they didn’t match the content of our class as closely as I wanted them to. So that was when I wrote my first textbook during my first sabbatical, in 2000.

Casey: How long had you been teaching at that point? 

Dave: I got to Guilford in 1993, so my first sabbatical was in 2000, and when I came back you (Casey) were in that Fall class in 2001, and yours was the first class I used my own book, called Alles klar? I called the second volume Mal was Neues with a pun on ‘mal’, thinking that I might actually get my books published, but I never did. 

As you might remember, I rarely used that book within the class, it was mostly for homework.

Casey: Exactly, is was for consolidating at home what we had learned and practised in class, or it was to prepare us for the upcoming lesson. Basically it was a written link to the spoken classroom activities. 

Dave: Yes – and that’s another big idea I developed for my students, what people refer to as flipping the classroom. And I had done that all the way back at Ohio State, inspired by our TA coordinator and the other TA’s and what they were doing. And I’ve always done that, I’ve never strayed from the idea that students try to get some basics down (assuming they do their homework) before they hear me talk about it in class, which cuts down on all of that explaining time in class, which is all I personally had in my college classes, explaining. ‘Let’s spend fifteen minutes talking about this point of grammar in English before practising it.’

Casey: Which for a lot of people (myself included) is still the path of least resistance when teaching languages. 

Dave: Yeah. And it doesn’t work well.

Casey: It’s interesting to me because I teach younger students, and either because I have more authority over them or because they’re simply more used to it, whenever I tell them ‘I need to speak in English now and I need to explain this to you for the next fifteen minutes’, sometimes I can get away with it, even with twelve year-old students. But it comes at a cost.

Dave: Yeah. 

Casey: By now, I’ve gotten to the point that when I do it, I sort of demonstrably apologise to them in advance, to try to justify it, saying there’s an important reason that I need to stand in front of them and make them write down what I say and copy these charts, and I’m going to need the following number of minutes to do so, so at least giving them a warning, and then I try to go multiple lessons before having to do the same thing. 

Dave: That’s good. And I think there may be at least a little difference with younger students. 

Casey: Maybe, but I’m not sure which group, university students or grade school students, is better at learning from a 15-minute explanation of grammar in English. You could argue for either group, actually. Either way it sounds like we both try to avoid this, but I think you’re better at doing so than I am. Anyway, what’s striking to me is that you said you wrote your textbook after teaching at the same college for seven years. Before that seven-year period, how long had you been teaching?

Dave: I was at Ohio State from 1985 to 1992, so seven years.

Casey: So it took you 14 years to fully abandon textbooks.

Dave: Yes. No one I knew had ever done that. Everyone used textbooks. I still don’t personally know anyone who doesn’t use a published textbook at all. When people see me teach now and they see all the materials and visuals I use, some of them – not all – say, ‘man I wish I could do that’. Because some of them agree with me that the canned nature of textbooks – maybe they’re better now, I don’t know – makes them a poor way to connect students to language production. Solots of teachers at least can imagine that if they had the time and the motivation they would rather use their own materials and not a book.

Casey: I also think a lot of teachers only use books superficially. I mean, look at a modern textbook suite, with a textbook, a workbook, maybe even a DVD, and a lot of them have interactive smartboard activities – there are books (e.g. Genial!) that are trying to fill every conceivable niche and every conceivable activity. As an early experiment when I was teaching in Vietnam, I once tried, for one chapter, to use as much as I could from the whole set of tasks from the textbook, and to let that be the pace of things, finishing everything sequentially from the book – and I had nowhere near enough time to do them all. I think lots of textbooks are overwritten, and lots of teachers who use them must cherry-pick what they want out of them. 

My next question is when you thought you were hitting your stride in terms of determining the content you needed to teach and when, what increments to review things in, etc.? When did those points reveal themselves to you?

Dave: It was exactly at the point when I was on the sabbatical, writing that textbook. I had to ask myself every day when I went out to the Café am Nordbad in Schwabing in Munich and spent the morning there working: what do students need to know for this lesson by this point, in order to speak well. That gave me this idea that they don’t need to know everything! And they need to know certain things earlier than you might think, if you look at some of the pacing of textbooks. 

Casey: Oh yeah?

Dave: For example: they don’t need to know all the prepositions all the way. When you’re teaching Dative for the first time you don’t need to teach ‘außer’, students don’t need to use ‘außer’ in their first semesters. They may never use ‘außer’! Here’s what they do need, in their first semester, in my opinion: ‘in’, ‘zu’ and ‘für’. Those are the essential ones to start with.

Casey: Now ‘in’ is complicated in German, do you try to teach the whole system behind ‘in das’and ‘in die’ and ‘in dem’ and ‘in der’, plus the whole nightmare of getting them to distinguish ‘in’ and ‘im’? 

Dave: No, I lie to them! Not really though, I tell them that ‘in’ takes the Dative when it means ‘in’. And later in the second semester I ‘update’ that and tell them that ‘in’ plus Accusative means ‘into’. But you can’t get into that right away, and anyway at least 90% of the time, first-semester German students are talking about where something is and not where something is going into. So I teach it with Dative first. 

Casey: So you lock in a correct usage of ‘in’ in a simple way and they feel confident with that and they understand that and that’s enough work in itself for, say, the first four months of language production.

Dave: Right, and you’ve seen my visual of ‘Dingsdorf’ with my little town and the prepositions that I throw up on the board with places. I use ‘in’ and ‘zu’ and teach them some of the Dative forms long before I have to explain the indirect object and its usage of Dative. I wait until the next semester to teach that.

Casey: It’s funny, I had a really strong 7th grade class two years ago, and because they were an advanced class I decided during a review session to review Dative as a whole. As in ‘let’s now review the four situations in which Dative is needed’ – indirect objects, dative prepositions, two-way prepositions, and dative verbs. I realised that by the time I was done explaining all four of these grammar concepts around Dative, like 35 minutes had passed and the students hadn’t practised anything! Even with a reasonably good group and even with my explanation which was reasonably vivid and clear, even in the best of circumstances, I don’t know whether I can defend the idea that it is worth my precious class time to ensure that these twelve year-old minds all understand ‘the Dative’ as such. 

Dave: I agree.

Casey: So how were your students responding to your classes? Did the nature of your interaction with them start to change over time, did you target your lessons differently?

Dave: I think I stayed pretty consistent on always trying to build my lessons on them as individuals, as a key guideline for my planning. Even though I pretty much do the same thing every year in those lower-level classes, I always visualise who the students are and ask if I need to tweak anything. I really think it through for each class, since each day I want to go in there and hit a home run in every class. I’ve never once had a day where I said to myself, ‘Oh, this is just going to be a boring class’ or something like that. I always want to feel good about what I’m trying to accomplish as I go into a lesson. It doesn’t always work out for every lesson, of course, but I always want to feel like I’ve prepared the best possible lesson for the students. I do try to think through who they are, where they in their lives. 

And the feedback they send me keeps me motivated. What I hear from them in their very first week and then after the first few weeks and at the end of the first semester is ‘this is so much fun, this is so different from how I learned in high school’. I mean if they’re in college German and they took it in high school they didn’t learn anything.

Casey: Or they’re cynical people who want an easy A.

Dave: There are some of those, yep. But those students often discover after three or four weeks that they’re actually getting left behind because they don’t think they have to do the homework. Solots of them have learned some but not as much as they think, and others – like me – truly learned very little that sunk in. Anyway I’ve had students tell me things like ‘it feels like we’re in Kindergarten!’ (Laughs)

Casey: (Laughs) Just for the record, that’s a complement.

Dave: It’s a huge complement! I loved it when I first heard that. And I’ve heard it a few times.

Casey: You know, I have to say, my own experience of your class – it was the first time I learned a foreign language with any success as a spoken language, and I was already 18 at the time and I had already had some false starts under my belt that admittedly had paved the way for my success in your class – it really was a kind of playground kind of experience, your class was. There was a lot of structured play that really did make me think of childhood. It was being confined to having to say something with a hand tied behind your back, since it was in German and I was of course new to German, and my first sensation was that this is what it is like to communicate as a child in a way, where your brain is ahead of your ability to express yourself and you have to compensate for that in some way, and I really enjoyed the sort of pure innocence of that whole game.

Dave: Yes, and by the way that’s exactly why I latched onto the idea of teaching children’s books and youth literature, following the same theory that you need to try to learn to read in a natural way – not like I did with looking up a bunch of words. I remember in my early days at Guilford, before I had arrived at my current methods for teaching reading, I remember some of my senior students being so frustrated with some of the reading I assigned them, asking me basically ‘how in the world am I supposed to read this expressionist play by Ernst Toller’ or whatever it was after two years of German, and I realised, man, they were right. It was hard to find the right reading to assign at first, since I couldn’t assign my students long vocabulary lists in good conscience, and I was encouraging them to read without a dictionary in order to develop their confidence, but it just didn’t work. So I latched onto the idea of starting with very basic children’s books, restricting their use of a dictionary, and growing it from there. And that worked really well. 

By the way, as you were talking earlier, I remembered an anecdote: we had a chair at Ohio State, this older German professor from Germany, and he came to the TA’s one time and said in a sort of a sinister voice and heavy accent, ‘I hear that many of you are playing games. I can’t say I approve.’ He was pretty disdainful of our approach.

Casey: Well of course, I mean from his point of view, this is university, right, it’s for adults, and games are for children. 

Dave: Right, but we were all thinking to ourselves ‘Okay, let’s see you teach this class and see how much the students get out of it’.

Casey: So Dave, tell me about how you came to use so much music in your lessons. 

Dave: I walk into the very first class, the very first minute of the very first lesson, playing the guitar. I’ve refined it so that I do it that way every year. The guitar is to shock them. There are something like 30 students in most years. So I play a few C chords, switch to a few G chords, and just kind of stand there in front of them playing, and then I say ‘Guten Morgen’. And the students sort of look around and mumble and laugh nervously. When I switch to G, I say ‘Guten Morgen’ at a higher pitch, and they instantly figure out they’re supposed to repeat it back to me. So I cycle through that with three or four different greetings, then I walk out of the room while saying ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, and by that point they’re beginning to chuckle and play along. I stay outside for maybe half a minute before I return and start again with ‘Guten Morgen’. It gets them thinking that they need to be ready for lots of call and response, right off the bat. From there I go straight into ‘Alle meineEntchen’. In the first semester I would say we sing in 85% of the class periods. By the second semester it really tapers off.

Casey: When did you realise that music was so useful to your ends in your introductory German classes?

Dave: I had the idea, I remember it very clearly, when I was inspired by my first college professors. That guy Gerhard Schmutterer loved singing with us – but not in class! Reuben’s wife, with whom I went to those summer classes, also taught us folk songs. Then during the one week of TA training that I received at Ohio State we had to present our plan to teach this or that. I didn’t have an acoustic guitar with me, but I had an electric guitar, without even an amp, and I strummed on it since you could still kind of hear it, and I did a song for the prepositions, something to do with that. And that was my little lesson. So from that beginning I knew I was going to try to incorporate some singing in my classes. I can’t remember how much I did at Ohio State, not that much probably, but when I got to Guilford I saw that it was a way to get students to relax, to mix it up and do something different, and I also realised that it helps with pronunciation. If you start early on and you hear someone singing and you try to mimic it, which is what you do naturally when you sing, you’re not going to make the same mistakes you otherwise would, like when you’re reading. You’re not going to force the word to sound like you want it to sound, you’re going to say it the way that you heard, the way that fits the song. 

Casey: So students are much more willing to ‘perform’ German with a song than they are willing to ‘perform’ German in the sense of being told to speak with a German accent right away.

Dave: Yeah. The song motivates, big time, and does something kind of magically, when it comes to getting them to learn things without realising they’re learning things.

Casey: Pronunciation as a hidden side effect of music, even if the students aren’t asked to focus on it.

Dave: Right, and then eventually I developed all of these grammar songs, which I presented once at a local conference, under the title of ‘Using Six German Melodies to Teach All of German Grammar’.

Casey: (Laughs)  

Dave: Something outrageous like that. But I use these different melodies from the initial songs we learned over and over again to teach different points of grammar.

Casey: Why do you think some grammar is better learned in song than in a twenty-minute explanation?

Dave: Because it sticks in your head. There isn’t a year that goes by without at least one student coming to me saying “I can’t get that ‘Alle meine Entchen’ song out of my head! I sing it in my dorm room!” And I’m thinking, yep! That’s the point!

Casey: What’s an example of a grammar song?

Dave: Let me think of a fun one. You learned a few of them, like with the modal verbs. Like I take the sort of folk chant ‘Wollen wir mal, wollen wir mal, hopsassassa’, and based on that song I teach all the modal verbs. And I string it into a story, with a call and response.

​

​Wollen wir mal, wollen wir mal, spazieren gehen?

​→ Ja ich will, ja ich will spazieren gehen.

​  

​Wollen wir mal, wollen wir mal, tausend Euro finden?

​→ Ja ich will, ja ich will tausend Euro finden.

So the story unfolds that you find a thousand euros and you end up staying in a luxury hotel in Cologne and stuff. So basically I introduce it, they repeat it, they manipulate the grammar a little bit for themselves, with a ton of repetition. They hear over and over again that the infinitive verb has to go at the end of each sentence, but without my having to stand in front of them and explain that to them for ten minutes. That kind of stuff can magically lead to a good understanding of something like modal verbs.

Casey: What you’re saying is that one of the main purposes of music is that it reinforces patterns. 

Dave: Yes!

Casey: We talked about your lists of verbs, not on paper but as cards you move around the board, which are meant to visually categorise them by colour, lists limited to only those verbs you think they need in their first three or four semesters.

Dave: Yes, what I’m doing is trying to help them learn more deeply without their realising it. I mean of course if they do realise it it’s fine, even better, but usually they’re not thinking totally consciously about how darker colours correspond to alphabetically later vowels, etc. It’s just meant to guide their guessing or their intuition the next time they have to use the verb ‘fliegen’ in the past tense as ‘bin geflogen’ and not ‘bin gefliegen’ – maybe the colour triggers the right guess. 

Casey: You mentioned an approach of lean verb teaching, reducing the set of verbs to only those they really need. Do you have a pithy philosophy of vocabulary teaching in general? How do you approach imparting new words in groups?

Dave: That’s actually been something that I’ve struggled with a lot, teaching vocabulary. My first thought is that students should get the vocab they need for their basic conversations through the things that we’re doing in activities, avoiding the assigning and memorising of sets of vocabulary. By the second year – third and fourth semesters of German – my idea is that students can pick up more vocab by reading these kids’ books and stuff, and that it will come naturally. But more and more I’m thinking that it would be great to develop more and greater active vocabulary learning. Of course, not in the way that was taught to me. I’ve come up with a couple of ideas in the last few years, actually, and one was inspired by a conference I went to recently. It was the idea of a running story, and I think it works and I’m going to keep developing it and fine-tuning it. It’s an idea to come in, one day a week at the beginning of class, and type as students speak while students come up with a story. I may ask them to use six specific words in the story. So I write them on the board, and the students have to invent a story on the spot as a group and I just type it, and they have to use the six words in their story. It was a little bit awkward at first, you know, the students were like ‘Wha?’

Casey: (Laughs)

Dave: But it got going and of course the story makes zero sense, but then I save it and then bring it back to them the next week, and their reaction is ‘Well, that’s a stupid story’, but we do it again, so I say ‘Here’s those original six words, remember what they mean? By the way let’s add these six new words’ and then they kind of get into it, and the story gets better from one week to the next, plus it has all of these vocabulary words that they see so often by the tenth week that they understand them better. 

That’s one idea for teaching vocabulary. The other thing is that I’ve started using this Wortschatzkiste, a treasure chest of vocabulary, so to speak [the German word ‘Wortschatz’ means vocabulary but it literally refers to a ‘treasure’ (Schatz) of words], for fairy tales in my fourth semester German class. It came as a result of the students’ frustration and my frustration as to how to work through all these recurring fairy tale words that the students just have to know in order to understand the stories. So I brought an actual treasure chest, like a physical trunk, with the treasure words in it, and the students are mystified, even with this stupid symbol of vocabulary – ‘Wortschatz’. It’s my way of trying to figure out ideas and then put them out each time we read a new fairy tale, grouped by story or theme or whatever. So I’m trying to build the way I teach vocabulary specifically. 

Casey: The blogs that I have been reading and the teachers and resources I found that I believe in, for my own teaching and based on my own experience learning with you, it’s all centred around the premise of comprehensible input. Essentially, it holds that the ratio of things that students don’t understand versus the ratio of things that students easily understand or understand with only some effort, that it needs to be strongly in favour of the latter, of comprehensible input. The other basic premise is ‘flooding’, giving learners the same input in terms of vocabulary and phrases and grammatical constructions over and over and over again, in ways that are patterned and playfully repeated. The whole idea is one of patterned input of things that you see a lot, in contexts that you can make sense of and relate to yourself, without needing to strain or sort through very much new vocabulary at any given moment. So that’s kind of the central tenet of this sort of school of teaching that I’ve been following online, and I wanted to hear your reaction to that, as well as how you arrived at your own ideas of comprehensible input and flooding.

Dave: You know, if you think of that running story idea and how that matches what you just said, it makes me wonder if that conference presentation I heard came out of that line of thinking. It really struck me because I had never thought of doing that before, specifically. From what I can tell, what you’re describing to me makes sense. It’s kind of weird that after all these years of teaching, I’m still thinking of basic questions like how to teach vocabulary! That’s interesting, I’ll have to think about that some more.

Casey: Well, I am one of your students, so I can tell you how you taught vocabulary, from my point of view at least. My perspective was that you taught very little of it, that you kept the circle of German we were using very, very tight. You didn’t cast a very wide net. So we learned how to say very basic things with a great degree of confidence, and hopefully accuracy, although accuracy wasn’t really the central point at the expense of other things. In the end I think that we learned how to say relatively few things, that you didn’t really teach us all that many words directly in our classes.

In a way your weakness when it comes to teaching vocabulary is a strength, simultaneously. If you as a teacher think you don’t have the teaching of vocabulary figured out, and as a result you default to teaching a very safe number of basic words, then that has, as you know and I know, a huge set of benefits when it comes to basic fluency and communicative confidence, even if you do sacrifice a bit of breadth in the process.  

Dave: Here’s what happened in my thinking. It’s exactly true what you said. I always prioritised other things over vocabulary learning. I was reading the evaluations I received over the years, and Guilford asks you to do self-evaluations, and I did notice a consistent theme, or students would tell me directly: ‘You know, I’m feeling good when I speak in German, but my vocab, I just don’t have enough words’. So I think that got to me eventually and my realisation has been, okay, so I’ve gotten good at all the other goals I’ve wanted to accomplish, like speaking and pronunciation and good command of grammar, I think I’ve got that down. How can I figure out how to increase the vocabulary element to my teaching? That’s what I’m focusing on now. It’s a legitimate thing for students to want to have more words to be able to use. 

Casey: Right. Do you remember I went to Tulane after I had to leave Guilford after two years? In my first German class at Tulane, let’s say a 5th semester German class, so for juniors, requiring two years of prior study, there were these students who just didn’t speak German. So the professor, Aoife Naughton, a terrific professor, simply wasn’t able to teach the class the way it was designed to be taught, at least on paper, by her department – the students simply weren’t able to take such a class. But on the other hand a number of those students in my class had had high school German and then their first two years at Tulane, so they had achieved a reasonable familiarity with the language, and a few of them had a much bigger vocabulary than I did. Lots of them knew words like ‘nachahmen’ (emulate) and ‘zuverlässig’ (reliable). I never would have learned those words in your class, but these students had learned that calibre of vocabulary – and nevertheless they were collectively unable to take a class designed for majors in German if that class was taught in German. Whereas I could speak very confidently and correctly with the professor to a degree that no one else could, which left me scratching my head why not.

Dave: That’s interesting. You know what, I think Brandon Winter, do you remember him?

Casey: Yeah.

Dave: I think he said the same thing when he transferred to Middlebury of all places, in Vermont. You’d think they would have a more progressive communicative programme, too. But when he first started there he reported back to me that he was just way ahead of all of the other students with his spoken German, even if they may have outpaced him on pure vocabulary, and I was thinking, really? At a good school like Middlebury? But there is a give and take, and there has got to be a way to have both – strong grammar, strong communication and fluency, and a broader vocabulary.

Casey: Another point that is widely discussed amongst teachers is the use of authentic materials. You’ve had to balance your own ways of flooding students with patterned input with a desire for authentic materials. Plus, because you’re a university professor, you do need to teach literature by the fifth semester, and that reading needs to be patterned at the beginning but then you also have to let students into the wild, so to speak, outside the safe habitat of the classroom. So how do you balance that conflicting need, authenticity vs. patterned input?

Dave: For reading specifically?

Casey: I suppose, yeah. For me this is an issue that is very important for teaching reading, but if you want to answer with a different skill in mind, go ahead.

Dave: Hmm … except for the work I did with the fairy tales and repeated vocabulary teaching there, I’ve really never worked to combine those two. With the reading it’s always been this notion that they would pick it up kind of like kids do, with some differences of course in terms of pace and whatnot, but in other words, the goal was always that if you can understand 75% of this story written for five year-olds – like maybe in the Janosch story O, wie schön ist Panama, and after discussing it and doing as much as we can to understand the preterite verbs in our work with it, and then in the next semester understand 75% of the story written for eight year-olds, and then the one after that for ten year-olds, to me the idea was that you would automatically understand the vocabulary, since that’s what a story is, really, and that it could all be a natural progression. 

Does that make sense?

Casey: What you’re saying is that your adult students had authentic texts in the sense that they were designed for an audience of German children, but that they also were reading highly targeted works in the sense that they are pitched at a very conservative level that only gradually scales up, never dipping below a certain percentage of comprehensible language that requires a dictionary for over, say, 25% of the book.

Dave: Yeah, and at the beginning I always say to my students that no dictionary is allowed. That’s in an effort to combat some students’ conception that they need to understand 100% of every page of everything they’re reading, which I encounter a lot. I’ve got to get students away from that idea. Because you do not need to understand 100% of a text in order to get a lot out of it. What I always tell students is to try for 75%. Of course, with students, how can they tell what percentage exactly they understand, but still, I constantly ask them to estimate on these little handouts I give them how much out of a hundred they think they understood. And they answer without questioning the entire premise, so somehow they have a feeling that the understood X percentage of the book, whether it’s 50 or 60 or more. So in that (totally unscientific) way I can at least get them thinking that ‘Wait, I can understand a good amount of German by just reading it, without having a dictionary’, and then of course in class we talk about the story, we break it down, we look at different things or words, and then that leads to a few ‘Aha’ moments, and then the students feel ready to proceed to the next passage. 

Casey: When you compare that approach to speaking, is it very different, the ratio of what needs to be comprehensible and what doesn’t, within a first-year German class? Clearly, when it comes to listening and speaking, students need to accept not knowing every word and they have tot ry to make sense of a basic message. So how do you arrive at a rate of comprehensibility for speaking tasks?

Dave: I think it’s very similar, actually, because you are going to be frustrated at times when you hear a foreign language. When I’m speaking to them in the early semesters, I base it largely on the expressions on their faces – I can tell if they’re frustrated or not following me, I can see that right away. If there’s one or two out of thirty who aren’t following, okay, maybe they’re just slacking off, or having a bad day, or whatever. But I can tell if the level of my input is challenging yet doable. And when they speak, they’re not going to do things in my class if they’re totally frustrated and it’s not working for them, they’re just going to say ‘I don’t get this!’ But by now I don’t get that attitude any more in any of my classes. I can also tell that with the reading. And I have to admit, I do get that reaction of ‘I don’t get it!’ a little when it comes to reading, especially if the students are not used to the method of trying to read without a dictionary. Some of them do convince themselves that they can’t do it, or sometimes they truly do not understand enough to avoid being frustrated. But now that I’ve found the right books to read, when I poll the students after each reading as to how they found it, there’s only one or two who say it was frustrating, and most get into it. So anyway I think it is a similar ratio between reading and speaking in terms of how much input needs to be comprehensible and how much can be above the students’ level.

Casey: The other thing is that, going back to the idea that ideally you’re not the one in the classroom doing the lion’s share of the talking, when students are listening to you explain something or tell a story in German, the main goal is not for them to be able to decipher every word of that, your bigger goal is to enable them to communicate something themselves.

Dave: Right. It’s also worth mentioning that I can adapt my speech when I can tell they’re not following, but the text can’t, it’s fixed regardless of how well the students understand it or not. 

Casey: As a college professor, the curriculum is sort of whatever you say it is, with the goal being that by the fifth semester the students can begin a study of German literature. Given that huge autonomy, how do you teach listening and how do you test it?

Dave: I really have more autonomy than most, because I’m the only one teaching German at Guilford, which is a great thing for the most part.

Casey: A one-man show. 

Dave: Not having someone to throw ideas back and forth with is one negative. But being able to do whatever you want is a positive! Literally whatever I want, I can do it. It’s so nice! 

Casey: (Laughs)

Dave: But anyway, hmm … listening comprehension, that’s a good question. When we were learning, it was all about cassette tapes. Listen to this tape, answer questions to show how much of it you understood, etc. And then when I was teaching at Ohio State with this communicative approach, I know they emphasised some taped stuff as well. But I totally have gotten away from that. So what do I do? Again, I must assume that the listening is going to come around, right along with the speaking. So that’s probably an area that I can develop more, after I develop my approach to vocab a little bit more, listening might be my next thing that I try to think more about.

Casey: Interestingly enough, Steve Smith and Gianfranco Conti have published a book this summer on teaching listening. And without having read it in depth I can already tell you that it is an attempt to get away from listening in classrooms as something for which students simply hear input and answer comprehension questions and maybe draw a conclusion or two; what they appear to be advocating instead is an idea of far more targeted, almost micro-listening tasks that are designed to twin listening with production. For example when the right grammar hinges on pronunciation, like say in German the difference between ‘ich wurde’ and ‘ich würde’, which is a major grammatical distinction based on one small sound difference that a lot of Americans can’t even pronounce perfectly anyway, so then the goal would be to train students to hear that difference more starkly, in playful, repeated, patterned ways, and pair it with the tasks you have them do to produce the language correctly themselves. All without a huge emphasis on testing per se.

Dave: Huh, I really like that idea, and I would love to see this book! That makes me think of my teaching in the summer in Graz, when I work with American opera students on their German. You can imagine, when I teach that set of students, they often start off from day one already knowing almost perfectly all these nuances of German pronunciation. They’re trained in hearing long versus short vowels even when they’re singing these 19th century words that nobody uses any more.

Casey: Exactly, if you remember I was an opera student myself when I first came into contact with the sound world of German. Musicians and particular singers have a huge advantage over the general population.

Dave: So once again, we come back to music. I’ll keep that question of listening in mind this summer.

Casey: If you read the blogs to which that these to authors post, they are often advocating games that are contrived to build recognition of a sound pattern through much repetition, and as we talked about before the specific learning goal might not be foremost in the students’ minds if they’re just enjoying the activity. Sometimes you can sneak in the implicit learning without over-explaining the explicit goal. The games are rarely designed to make students compete against each other for who can say something with the best grammar, which as we both know usually just rewards the usual strong students and loses the usual weak students while the middle just gets a modicum of practice. 

One game that I’ve started using in lots of different classes in different levels is their game of ‘sentence stealing’, for which you show students maybe twenty different sentences, with all twenty sentences using the same grammatical structure that you’re trying to teach. So students see the verbs in the same position over and over again, with similar conjugations, etc. I’ve used this with my advance students who were making some pretty bad errors with the passive voice. So my idea was to play this sentence stealer game with sentences that mixed the passive with the subjunctive, making students see the ‘ich würde’ next to the ‘ich wurde’ endlessly until the difference became clear. For example, ‘Ich würde Ihnen die Hausaufgaben zeigen, Herr Creel, aber ich wurde auf dem Weg zur Schule bestohlen!’ or something like that. Twenty sentences following that pattern, with easy enough vocabulary that all the students could easily figure out what the sentences meant – otherwise they’re just half-heartedly playing a game with a bunch of words they don’t know. So you give each student four slips of paper and they secretly write down their favourite four sentences from the list. Then they go around to various other students hoping to steal the other students’ sentences by guessing which sentences they have – if they say the right sentence, they steal the slip of paper. It’s slightly tactile and it’s competitive, with everyone always trying to avoid losing their slips and try to gain other students’ slips. It forces each student to say all of these sentences like up to a dozen times or even more.

Dave: I love it!

Casey: Yeah, and it shows how just a bit of clever strategising on the part of the teacher can target exactly those things that students are getting wrong. Even my best students make these very basic errors with articles, particularly when it comes to something like relative clauses, which are beautifully logical in German but are nevertheless a bit complex. So over the years I’ve made it my goal to get craftier and craftier in forcing students into arriving at the right relative pronoun through various tricks and games. The question is always, how do I get this system into their brains? And the answer is sometimes that you cannot just go through the front door, as it were, by explaining it to death.

I have a question about your lesson planning. At this point in over thirty years of teaching German as a foreign language, how much time do you need to plan your lessons?

Dave: I always take about two hours every morning. At the college I teach either one or two classes a day. If I only teach one class, it’s the upper-level one, so I need more time for that more advanced class, and if it’s two, they’re both large classes of lower-level German so I spend maybe an hour for each class, each session. 

Casey: Wow. What advice would you give to a teacher who teaches four classes a day, or, as is in the case in my school on some days with some teachers, even five or six lessons in a single day?

Dave: That sounds so stressful to me, but I would still say that you must be able to adapt your lessons day-to-day. There are a few times now and then where I can’t devote my normal hour and a half or two hours to my lesson planning – but not often, because I like my routine! But when you don’t have the time, you just have to brush through things more quickly and adapt. Personally I like to really settle into it and take my time with planning lessons.

Casey: And your goal is still that every single lesson should be a great lesson, after which the students go hüpfend nach Hause, with a spring in their step.

Dave: Absolutely. I’m motivated by that every day. 

Casey: Wow, respect. Is there anything that you lament about your students?

Dave: Hmm. Well, some students just won’t do the homework no matter what, so that’s the one thing, and you kind of accept it after a point, that there’s always going to be X number of students that just won’t do it. It’s not that much homework and I try to break it down. The ones who do the homework ‘get it’ and they’re the ones who make this great progress, but the ones who don’t have a harder time and you’re thinking, ‘come on, why not try the homework!’

Casey: And mind you this is meant to be really targeted, well designed homework, not an arbitrary set of sentences to write just to fill time. 

Dave: If you’re flipping the classroom at all, the students have to do this little bit of homework or it doesn’t work. And then in the upper levels, if they’re not doing the reading, then that’s really tough. So those few students and their issue with homework is my one lament, if they’re consistently not doing it. 

Casey: If you could put yourself in the shoes of someone doing exactly what you do but with Grade 8 students instead of college students, so with thirteen or fourteen year-olds instead, do you think you would make major changes to your teaching?

Dave: I don’t think so. I’ve thought of that before. I don’t think I would. I would love to try sometime. I’ve always thought, it must be so much harder to teach students who don’t necessarily want to be there. In college you assume, even though it may be a required class, okay, that the students are paying for it, they mostly want to be there, they are motivated to get a job one day, and it must be different if you’re in public school, I would think, if you’ve got this group of kids that doesn’t necessarily want to learn or even be there. So I’ve always wondered that, but I think I would mostly do the same things. 

Casey: Right. I would actually accuse you of secretly having a middle-school German classroom in a university setting. Which makes me think of that older German man at Ohio State who was so sceptical of your use of games. 

Dave: (Laughs) Man, the way he said the word ‘games’, with this slow scowl! Yes, we are playing games!

Casey: We talked a little bit about what your students might find hard about your class and one thing is that if they’re university students in their third year of their major, they’re now twenty years old and they’re juniors in college, and they need have to advanced to German literature, which is a big ask if they’ve only had two years under their belt. Maybe some of them find their vocabulary limited if they never learned big batches of words by memory in your class up to that point. Is there any other thing your students find difficult about your classes?

Dave: Just to clarify on the reading: the fifth semester, so at the beginning of the third year, is when students get the full-on, regular literature, and again I ask them to read where possible without a dictionary. And by this point in my career it actually works. When I was teaching maybe twenty-five years ago I had students who at that point were really frustrated that they couldn’t follow any of the literary reading, but that was before I had incorporated youth literature, so from Janosch stories advancing to little sixty-page youth novels to 100-page and then 200-page young adult novels, ending maybe with a book by Mirjam Pressler in the fourth semester. That progression really works, the improvement has been night and day. By now it’s usually only one or two students in my upper-level German class who have any real problem reading regular German literary fiction after two or two-and-a-half years – while still minimising dictionary use. So that might be the best thing I’ve developed in my progression of teaching over the years, which by the way was also inspired by a conference presentation.

Casey: Really!

Dave: Yeah. The children’s literature movement was a big deal right when I needed it, in the 1990’s.

Casey: Dave, I also what to ask you about the things you do outside the classroom, as the sole representative of the German programme, to build a sort of eco-system around your language classes in an effort to complement them. You’ve done a lot to increase exposure to spoken German and to German culture by organising events that your students are encouraged or in some cases even required to attend. When did you realise the importance of doing so?

Dave: Right away. I started a German club in my second year or maybe even first year at Guilford. That was inspired by my own two undergraduate professors who had done something similar, build community. 

Casey: Yeah, you mentioned they used to do lots of singing with you, though not in the class. Where did this singing take place then? 

Dave: In his home, that German guy would host these sort of song evenings at his home. At a couple points in the semester he would invite us over, especially for the German Honor Society, and he would say things like – my sister reminded me of this because she was his student as well – ‘Now the men will stay here in the living room and the women will go to the kitchen to help my wife’.

Casey: Unbelievable.

Dave: That kind of thing, yeah. Wahnsinn! But he was a friend of our family actually, and both of my siblings had him as their German teacher. He actually admitted to us once that when he was making his grading scale, he would base the minimum required to get an A on whatever our grade was on a particular test, us three Limburg kids. My brother told me once he was taking a test Schmutterer actually took the pencil out of his hand and changed his answer to the correct thing so that he would get still get the A.

Casey: What?! Crazy.

Dave: (Laughs) Yeah! But back to the topic, you’ve got to build community, that’s the key, I think. 

Casey: And this German club of yours, what did it consist of?

Dave: So here are the huge keys to the success of German at Guilford:

1) Stammtisch. So outside of the classroom, having a regular German conversation group. And lots of very good German teachers I know just haven’t tried this or don’t do it regularly. They know that it works well, but for various reasons – it can be hard to get going – they don’t do it. We have ours at a local coffee house, we invite anyone who can speak any level of German, whether students or faculty or people from the community, including German native-speakers, former soldiers, whatever. So the students feel comfortable conversing in basic German. Huge boost to the community. Students have really grown to love it, because after the first semester, when they’re still quite nervous, I’ve required them to come a certain number of times, and the ones who keep going just make this huge progress with their speaking.

2) Our Munich semester, of course. That gets everybody excited and brings more purpose and focus to our coursework.

3) Our German club, which varies from year to year in terms of numbers and engagement, but it’s grown pretty consistent and it also helps establish a community of students who want to deepen their knowledge of German culture. And there it’s less about speaking German and more about events, films, whatever. It’s open to people who don’t speak German themselves but are interested in some of the topics we’re doing in our classes.

Those things help us invest heavily in establishing community. 

Casey: So you’ve taken it upon yourself to organise these movie nights or host these little musical events that you might incorporate into other events like school-wide functions for which you organise some German folk music and some German food. 

Dave: Yeah, I just started hosting this Aprilfest that we do every year now, and opened it up to the whole school. It grew into this huge event, especially if the weather is good. That depends somewhat on the strength of the German club in a given year, in terms of organisation and promotion. And we always organise a film evening with contemporary or classic German cinema. One of the main goals is to connect people from off-campus with our students if we can. 

Casey: And you see this paying off in your classroom?

Dave: Totally, yes. Because the students then know each other better and are more able to work together on these classroom activities that I give them. Plus it sort of lends the whole German academic programme a sort of a cooler vibe, a greater spirit of pride in being involved. Especially after students return from a Munich semester if they’ve done it, helping them to keep their interest in more than just the language going strong. So all of it combines to get students to feel like there’s something bringing it all together.

Casey: Even if they’re in North Carolina and they’re learning about a historical and then a contemporary society across the ocean. 

Dave: Yes, exactly. By the way, can I run an idea by you?

Casey: Of course!

Dave: So I just ran across this grant called ‘Deutsch macht Spaß’ by the AATG (American Association of Teachers of German) for $500 dollars for something that you intend to be fun, and I read that it can also go to a college-level programme. So I thought about it over the summer, which is when I step back and develop a lot of my ideas, and I thought, wait a minute, I’m doing this course on the Weimar era of German culture and politics, in 2019, that’s the 100-year anniversary of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, the movie that I always start the course with, and I thought what if we do a Caligari event? And get the school’s music professor Tim Lindeman involved to play piano, live with the movie? You know, we’d put up posters around school with Caligari’s face saying ‘Du wirst Caligari werden’, which apparently is how the original movie was advertised in 1920, without giving any other information about it, just this creepy phrase! Weird stuff like that, and I thought about the innovation of the frame story, which was a big deal at the time, and I was thinking of building a huge wooden frame that people would have to walk through to get into the auditorium, for example.

Casey: So a fun device to prepare them psychologically for the experience of the movie. 

Dave: Yeah – which makes me think of Brecht handing out cigarettes before performances of his plays to keep people in an analytical frame of mind for his plays, keeping the Verfremdung going, and not let people get too engaged with the story by identifying with it. But anyway my question is whether you have any ideas for that event.

Casey: I’ll never have as many ideas as you, Dave!

Dave: Well, whatever I can do to make it fun! 

Casey: Any final thoughts?

Dave: Sure, I’ll give you the quote that my dad gave me, I’ve always remembered it. And it was a huge help when I was applying for a Fulbright teaching fellowship, when I wrote a really terrible, boring little autobiographical essay as part of my application. The chair of this Fulbringtprogramme was on the faculty of Ohio State, my alma mater. He was actually my PhD advisor, and so he took a look at my application. He read it and handed it right back to me and told me I had to write something completely different, that I had to make it interesting. So I asked my dad. And he told me to start with this quote from some Rabbi whose name I’ve forgotten. ‘Teaching is lighting the candles.’ So I wrote something around that quote, thinking about how teaching is lighting the candles. I ended up getting the position, too. So my dad has always talked about teaching as being the lighting of candles, and I agree.