Cooperation between native and non-native teachers in German language classes in Japan

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From April 1995 to July 1997 several German classes for freshmen at Hokkaido-University were taught German by teams consisting of a Japanese teacher and a native speaker using the same textbook published in Germany and preparing their lessons in close cooperation. The aim of this experiment was to discover, if the communicative method can work in Japan and what adjustments are necessary to adapt it to the context of general education classes and to the students' cultural and educational background.At the end of every term tests on reading and listening comprehension and writing were carried out in order to diagnose the level of proficiency that can be achieved within the given framework.As the same tests was used in traditional classes we expected to be able to determine whether a change in the teaching method had any measurable impact on students' perfomance.An initial comparison of written production after the first term has shown that the students of the 'experimental' classes produced much longer, more coherent, structured and comprehensible texts within the same time, probably because the first lessons of the textbook provided them with a ready-to-use set of basic phrases and vocabulary and thus increased their writing speed and enabled them to achieve more global text planning, although there were no major differences' observed witn regard of syntactic and lexical errors. Examination of a few videotaped lessons revealed a considerably higher level of student activity especially during pairwork.Both Japanese and foreign teachers are strongly influenced by the way they have learned foreign languages themselves, in teaching they tend to reproduce their own-quite different-experiences, so that, at the beginning, close cooperation required much patience and willingness to work out compromises.However, once a basic consensus is established it is clear that their abilities complement one another.