Canal-U

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 academic landscape in Western Germany was changing slowly, yet profoundly. One major development was the academization of teacher education, i.e. the implementation of the idea that the professionalization of future teachers had to based on academic foundations. This referred to educational sciences like, for example, pedagogy and psychology as well as to the respective content-based disciplines like, for example, maths, languages or the arts.

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

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

Bibliography

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

Doff, S. (2008). Englischdidaktik in der BRD 1945-1989. Konzeptuelle Genese einer wissenschaftlichen Disziplin. München: Langenscheidt-Longman.

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