Wolfgang Butzkamm

Spoilsports: Stubborn teachers, the personal observations of learners and research in the classroom

If only it wasn’t for a small but constant flow of articles, in which stubborn teachers write in opposition to the prevailing ideology and describe their bilingual techniques: a wealth of telling practical experience, often without theoretical pretence or an in-depth understanding of the long history behind the topic. These works are usually apologetic in tone. The topic ‘mother tongue’ is a well-kept family secret for many, a “skeleton in the cupboard…a taboo subject, a source of embarrassment”, according to Prodromou (2002: 6). Time and time again, using the mother tongue is accompanied by feelings of guilt. As a result, most of these contributions are more or less timid attempts at legitimation, and hence more or less cautious formulations.

Alternatively, we can look at a case involving a language lecturer at York University, who is inspiring everybody with her 50 participant strong Italian course: “She’s breaking every rule there is. She translates everything as she goes along, she mixes in a lot of grammar, she has students parroting phrases and answers.” (TES 3/10/1975) More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that there are carefully crafted bilingual methods such as Curran’s counselling approach and suggestopaedia, which has enjoyed some popularity as an “alternative method” for teaching mature-age classes.

How is this possible? Can both sides be right - the avoidance of, indeed, the ban on the mother tongue and its opposite, its regular use in presenting a text? Not really, and so these successes are either explained away or ignored. Here, it is not the bilingual teaching techniques that are critical, but rather the energetic and good-humoured personality of the lecturer in York, her meticulous planning; or it is the friendly learning atmosphere created by the Suggestopaedia technique, which is often accompanied by music and other aesthetic elements. It is not the translations.

I find it particularly revealing when accomplished teachers learn a new language and realize that, as learners of a language, they want the very thing they are denying their own pupils. This, among other things, is what an English teacher noted down for herself when she was participating in a course on modern Greek: “I’m not satisfied with getting the gist, I want to understand every word.” “Translating the text was good, lots of dictionary work.” “I’m going to learn the dialogue by heart, translate it into Greek and then back into English.” (McDonough, 2002: 405). She sees the contradiction between what she writes and her own approach as a teacher, she sees it in her colleagues as well, but she does not offer any solution. Don’t we all know it in our bones: when we encounter a new piece of language, we want to know straight away and without further ado what it means precisely, so that we can put it to use immediately, work with it and make the most of it? Isn’t it only the “experts” who tell us that the slow struggle for comprehension with a teacher miming and arm-waving and drawing little stick-figures on the board is preferable? Or are we content with inaccurate guessing and prepared to wait perhaps for weeks until the penny drops? Let us do what comes naturally – it is all so blindingly obvious.

The imperative to abide by a doctrine of monolingualism cannot reconcile these opposing attitudes. 1967 saw the publication of C. J. Dodson’s groundbreaking work, Language teaching and the bilingual method. In it, Dodson presented a new bilingual method, conceived on the basis of a series of controlled experiments on teaching – a frontal attack on the ban on the mother tongue.

As is very rarely the case, Dodson’s work inspired researchers from various countries who then tried either to replicate his experiments directly or to carry out similarly structured comparisons of methods: bilingual techniques were found to be superior to their monolingual counterparts, always. (Sastri, 1970; Walatara, 1973; Meijer, 1974; Ishii et al., 1979). Butzkamm (1980) reported on a successful two-year experiment with the bilingal approach in a German grammar school. Dodson’s work was again validated by Kaczmarski (1988) and Caldwell (1990). Kasjan’s (1995, 1996) feasibility study on German for Japanese university students is also explicitly owebased on Dodson’s seminal study.