Sabine Doff - „With a little help from my friends …“ The dialogue between Foreign Language Education („Fremdsprachendidaktik“) and referential disciplines in Western Germany 1945-1989

In the decades after World War II the academiclandscape in Western Germany was changing slowly, yet profoundly. One majordevelopment was the academization of teacher education, i.e. the implementationof the idea that the professionalization of future teachers had to based onacademic foundations. This referred to educational sciences like, for example,pedagogy and psychology as well as to the respective content-based disciplineslike, for example, maths, languages or the arts.

Next to an extension of these academicsubjects at traditional universities, this also led to the emergence of aspecial type of universities of education („Pädagogische Hochschulen“), i.e. institutionsthat catered for future teachers at primary and middle school levelexclusively. Moreover, this development supported the coming of age of academicdiscplines labelled „Fachdidaktiken“ (subject pedgagies). These were newdiscipline-specific pedagogies of various school school subjects, for example,foreign languages; the respective academic discipline in this case was labelledforeign language education („Fremdsprachendidaktik“).

This paper traces the main circumstances and influenceson the history of foreign language education (FLE) as an academic discipline inWestern Germany in the post-war period up to 1989. It starts with a perspectiveon the institutional level by looking at where and by whom the new disciplinewas taught. In a next step the focus changes onto the content level by tracing influencesfrom and into the so-called referential disciplines, for example, (applied)linguistics, literary studies and the educational sciences. It will be shownhow these varied in scope and kind of influence on the development of FLE. Byinvestigating the inter- and transdisciplinary discourse in various types ofpublications, for example journals and conference proceedings, it will tracethe intensifying dialogue between the emerging FLE discipline and its mainreferential disciplines and thus show how ideas travelled and changed in thegrowing academic field of language learning and teaching.

Bibliography

Appel, J. (Hrsg.) (2004). Aufschwung imRückblick. Fremdsprachendidaktik der sechziger Jahre. München:Langenscheid-Longman.

Doff, S. (2008). Englischdidaktik in der BRD1945-1989. Konzeptuelle Genese einer wissenschaftlichen Disziplin. München:Langenscheidt-Longman.

Doyé, P. / Heuermann, H. / Zimmermann, G.(Hrsg.) (1988). Die Beziehung der Fremdsprachendidaktik zu ihrenReferenzwissenschaften. Dokument und Bericht vom 12.Fremdsprachendidaktiker-Kongress. Tübingen: Narr.