Wolfgang Butzkamm

Maxim 5. MT techniques allow teachers to use richer, more authentic texts sooner. This means more comprehensible input and faster acquisition.

The measured and well calculated contribution of the mother tongue can allow pupils to tackle more difficult texts sooner. Banal texts without educational value, on the other hand, jeopardise FL lessons, particularly those that have been started late.³

We find excellent texts all the time that we nonetheless do not use because they contain passages that are too difficult, requiring too much time and effort. Here, it is possible to use bilingual editions to help us with certain passages. Why do we not clarify these passages by giving translations to the pupils in advance? Interested pupils, in particular, often resort to using these comprehension aids. With difficult texts, the languages share the load.

Alternatively, we can recommend pupils to look at the foreign language versions of their personal, favourite books first read in their mother tongue. Why can’t they re-read their favourite Asterix or Tintin story in French as well, and maybe even talk about it briefly in front of the class? German pupils have been known to read the Harry Potter books in English after they had read the German

version or seen the films in their MT.

There are various ways in which MT aids can stimulate students to read authentic texts which might seem too daunting if such support were not provided. A series of children’s books by O´Sullivan & Rösler employs a new kind of language mix. The stories usually involve encounters between English and German teenagers who sometimes try to speak the partner language but generally stick to their own language and practise a sort of receptive bilingualism. The narrator switches between the languages according to the situation:

She marched straight up to him.

"Was willst du?" she demanded.
Edzard wurde rot. "Wie meinst du das, was will ich? Ich habe doch' gar nichts gesagt."
Fiona was angry. "Gar nichts gesagt, aber ... aber ..." Shit! This bloody language. To hell with it, she'd just have to try it in English. "You've been following me all day long. I mean it's bad enough you having crashed into me on the bicycle yesterday and then having raced off without saying a word, but if you want to apologize, you don't really have to follow me around all day to do so."
"Sorry", entschuldigte sich Edzard. Er zögerte einen Moment. "I didn't want to make you sick", fuhr er fort. Fiona had to smile. "Make me sick? What do you mean?"
"Verstehst du mich, wenn ich Deutsch rede?" fragte er zurück.
"Yeah, more or less."
"Ich wollte sagen, daß ich dich nicht kränken wollte."
"You didn't want to annoy me. O.K., but then why were you following me?"(O´Sullivan & Rösler, 1986: 12)

Those of my students who knew the books as teenagers were enthusiastic about them.

Maxim 6. Bilingual techniques allow teachers to bypass the grammatical progression of textbooks. No postponement of the subjunctive.

“Gestern war Sonntag” is just as easy for a five-year-old to understand as “Heute ist Montag”, but not for two-year-olds given their undeveloped understanding of temporal space. English pupils who have been encouraged early on to say things like “Ich habe leider mein Buch vergessen” [I’m sorry I forgot my book] have a reference point from which to make sense of the form when it comes to be formally taught. The reluctance to introduce the past tenses very early on does not take into consideration the pioneering work that the mother tongue has already done, much to the benefit of the foreign language. Similarly, English pupils could easily handle a subjunctive such as “Ich hätte gern eine Cola” in their first week of lessons. Again, this will make it easier to choose authentic texts. The appreciation of this point alone could revolutionize foreign-language teaching worldwide.

In an English grammar book, we read something like: “Together with the infinitive of the perfect, needn’t assumes past meaning, thus negating, or questioning, the necessity of an already-completed action.” Of course, it starts to make sense with an example. But it makes even more sense if the example is accompanied by an idiomatic translation. Now the explanation is superfluous:

Du hättest nichts sagen brauchen. You needn’t have said anything.

Er hätte nicht kommen brauchen. He needn’t have come.

The more difficult it gets, the more we need the MT. Here, oral utterance equivalents as used by Dodson are best (intonation!):

Das kann ich auch nicht essen

Je ne peux pas manger ça non plus.
I can’t eat this either.

Das kann ich nicht auch noch essen.

Je ne peux pas manger ça en plus.
I can’t eat this as well!

This example is by no means far-fetched. The problem of meaning-conveyance has mostly been discussed in terms of individual words – whether a word equivalence such as “la paix”= “peace” can be avoided by means of a monolingual explanation. This leaves out a large number of the greatest problems learners have with FL meanings, namely those which are largely determined by context. This becomes obvious when using comic strips in the classroom.

Apart from clarifying grammatical functions and nuances of grammatical meanings by idiomatic translations, we can clarify grammatical structures through literal translation or the “Technik der Spiegelung” (mirroring), although perhaps only for learners whose MT is firmly in place. This is a time-honoured technique and frequently used in modern grammars of “exotic” languages. It is a shame that it is so little used in classrooms.

“… we may note a disconcerting logic about German which, putting the adjective before the noun, like all Germanic languages, puts the whole of an adjective phrase there, too. English has ‘buttered bread’, but ‘bread spread with butter and jam’; German has ‘with butter and strawberry jam spread bread’. In other words, in speaking German, one must have the entire content of one’s adjective phrase ready before the noun which it qualifies makes its appearance.” (Burgess, 1992: 110). So this is how German word-order could be explained, again just once, at a first encounter:

Der in wenigen Minuten einlaufende Zug
*The in a few minutes arriving train
(The train due to arrive in a few minutes)

Schließlich kam er

*Eventually came he

Ich muß mein Auto waschen

^* I must my car wash.

German compounds, if they are not transparent at first sight, could also be clarified: Germans say Handschuh “hand-shoe” for “glove”, and “Faustregel” , i.e. “rule of fist” instead of “rule of thumb”. That way, the foreign word has a familiar ring to it, and has become less foreign. At the same time, we might refer English learners to Shakespeare (Lady Macbeth: “O! Never shall sun that morrow see!”) or the Authorized Version of the Bible: “Woman, why weepest thou?“ [Weib, warum weinst du?] (John 20,13;).

Finally, a serial verb construction from a remote (West-African) language:

nam utom eemi ni mi

do work this give me
'Do this work for me' ( Givón, 1989: 331)

The language learner needs to understand both what is meant (the message) and how it is said (syntactical transparency). If the phrases he uses remain structurally opaque he will produce errors such as voici sont les livres and Rebecca j’aime le EastEnders (= Rebecca likes East-Enders).

I have always found word-for-word and sometimes morpheme-for-morpheme translations an elegant and economical way of helping learners see through unaccustomed and odd-sounding FL structures without resorting to grammatical terminology. So have countless language teachers in past centuries. Grammatical explanation by imitation, not by analysis.

Leading German textbooks have bilingual grammar and vocabulary sections (must not = nicht dürfen). Here, common sense has prevailed, but only part of the problem has been solved since the practice remains without a solid theoretical underpinning. Moreover, many countries still favour purely monolingual textbooks. It is in these countries, where purely English-language textbooks are widespread, that pupils truly suffer.

Maxim 7. We need to associate the new with the old. To exclude MT links would deprive us of the richest source for building cross-linguistic networks. No quarantine for MT cognates and related words.

The well-directed and informative use of lexical and syntactic parallels between the mother tongue and the European foreign languages taught in schools promotes retention and deepens the understanding of the historical affinity of language and culture. The relationship between languages should be clearly established and not ignored or suppressed. While it is normal to associate new items with known items within the FL, or even form associations between two foreign languages, the MT, the most powerful instrument and greatest treasure-house of words, is often excluded in building networks. Frankly, this situation seems to me absurd, and the doctrine of monolingualism is clearly to blame for it. MT cognates can function as decoding devices even without being suitable translation equivalents and can help students to remember the target word. Even more important, creating links to MT words can extend the pupils’ knowledge of their own language. When I taught a dialogue which started with the line “You’ve got a C in history” I found to my surprise that very few 12-year-olds knew the word “historisch” and all those who thought they knew the word said it meant something like “famous” or “well known”. So both languages can profit. The study of cognates and family resemblances can be made interesting to many pupils especially if it sheds light on our common history and heritage. Pupils, by themselves, would not see the semantic link between “matching exercise” which they find in their coursebook and a “football match” or “Match” as used in German. “WC” is used in German too, but only English tells us what the letters stand for. What is the relation between blackboard, “boarding-school” and German “Bord”? For English pupils to know that “häßlich” is “ugly” may be enough, but why not make the connection with “hate” and “hassen”? There are literally thousands of related words to be explored. “Only connect…” (E.M. Forster), because connecting begets understanding, and understanding begets sympathy.