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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
German schools are gradually outgrowing the stage of chaos into which they had been plunged by the war. In a great effort the worst difficulties of the post-war period have been overcome, but conditions cannot yet be called normal. Classes still comprise 40 pupils and more. Although many schools have been rebuilt or newly built since the war, the bigger towns, which were nearly all heavily bombed, are still so short of accommodation that most school buildings have to be used in double shifts, i.e., two schools share one building, one school going in the morning, the other in the afternoon. The teaching load of a high school teacher is 25 periods (of 45 minutes each) a week. But in some respects peacetime conditions are gradually returning. Thus, the production of textbooks is approaching a satisfactory stage. There are two or three dozen different English courses for schools on the market, and a very large number of English and American texts in school-editions (with annotations). A catalogue published in the summer of 1955 enumerates 532 such editions printed in the Federal Republic of Germany, and there is nothing to prevent German schools from buying reading materials from Britain or the United States. A number of the German Länder have introduced a system by which all schoolbooks are provided free of charge.
This is the first of a projected series of articles, commissioned by the Editor of PMLA, on foreign language teaching in other nations. It refers only to conditions in the Federal Republic of Germany (i.e., Western Germany, with its population of about 50,000,000), since the author could give no first-hand information on conditions in Eastern Germany (the German Democratic Republic) with its population of about 18,000,000. Dr. Koelle, who studied at Hamburg and Oxford universities (Rhodes Scholar 1930–32), is currently responsible for the professional training of teachers of English in the high schools of the City State of Hamburg, and is Vice- Chairman of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Neuphilologenverband. In 1953 he visited schools and colleges in the U. S. under the “Cultural Exchange of Leaders” Program of the Department of State.
1 Among others: Adolf Bohlen, Methodik des neusprachlichen Unterrichts (Heidelberg: Quelle u. Meyer, 1953), 175 pp.; Rudolf Münch, Prinzipien und Praxis des englisciien Unterrichts (Berlin-Köln: Weidmann-Greven, 1953), 215 pp.
2 Mitteilungsblatt des Allgemeinen Deutschen Neuphilologenverbandes (Berlin: Verlag Cornelsen), 6 times a year: Die Neueren Sprachen (Frankfurt-am-Main: Verlag Moritz Diesterweg), monthly; Aus der Praxis, für die Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts (Dortmund: Verlag Lambert Lensing), 4 times a year.
3 The total number of children attending the Gymnasium in the Federal Republic in 1953 was 754,000; the number of full-time men teachers in these 1,600 schools was 22,000 (full-time women teachers, 10,000).
4 A detailed account of this is given in UNESCO's 1955 publication, The Teaching of Modern Languages (a report on the 1953 Ceylon Conference), pp. 136–149.
5 That is, 4 years at the university, 1 year in the country whose language he means to teach, and 2 years of professional training.