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

从1995年4月至1997年7月，北海道大学的几个德语新生班由一名日本教师和一名母语为德语的人组成的小组教授德语，使用德国出版的同一本教科书，并密切合作备课。这个实验的目的是发现，为了使交际教学法在日本的教学中发挥作用，并使之适应普通教育的教学环境和学生的文化教育背景，需要进行哪些调整。为了判断在给定的框架内所能达到的熟练程度，在每学期结束时进行了阅读和听力理解以及写作的测试。同样，我们在传统课堂上进行了测试，希望能够确定教学方法的改变是否对学生的表现有任何可衡量的影响。第一学期后对书面产出的初步比较表明，“实验”班的学生在相同的时间内写出了更长、更连贯、更有结构和更易理解的文本，这可能是因为教科书的第一课为他们提供了一套现成的基本短语和词汇，从而提高了他们的写作速度，使他们能够实现更全面的文本规划，尽管在句法和词汇错误方面没有观察到重大差异。通过对几节课的录像进行分析，可以发现学生的活动水平相当高，特别是在结对学习时。无论是日本教师还是外国教师，都受到自己学习外语的方式的强烈影响，在教学中，他们倾向于再现自己的经验，因此，在开始时，密切合作需要很大的耐心和妥协的意愿。然而，一旦建立了基本共识，它们的能力显然是相辅相成的。

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.