Minority Children

While the class was having religious instruction, the class teacher was free to give an intensive German course to five of the children from her class. It is their first year at school, most of them are 6 years old, one is 7 because he had lived somewhere else last year and had not been sent to school (!).

The children were all sitting round a table with their teacher and enjoyed the class as they had the feeling that it was a games lesson. The focus of that lesson was articles, as the wrong use of articles in German is a very frequent and conspicuous mistake in immigrant language. In different games they practised the articles of well-known animals and of classroom and personal objects. Some of the language games were based on games the pupils know anyway such as memory.

What I particularly liked was that the teacher spoke German without a trace of local dialect, which is very rare in our area, but confronts the children with the standard they also hear in the media and use in writing.

The other thing was that all the games had a social component in addition to the language focus. A pupil would win a card for a correct answer. If he won more than 2 cards, however, he was asked to give it to another pupil of his choice. Turn taking was also handled in a very unobtrusive but sensitive manner to make sure that the more quiet or less gifted pupils were given an equal share in the activities. Some of the activities also involved movement like making an animal sounds and moving through the room like that animal with the other pupils saying the word for that sound (e.g. practising a structure like this is a cat meowing) and then imitating the movement. What seems important is that this approach includes no theoretical explanations (e.g. on the use of the article in German), but is based on learning by doing, on the repetition of patterns until they are retained and available for active use.