The topic of this paper is teaching German as a second language in the Federal Republic of Germany. The paper examines a bilingual situation in which members of a foreign minority, while striving to preserve their own national identity, are forced to learn another language in order to assimilate the cultural system of a new homeland.

This paper attempts to explore some of the implications of viewing language learning as a process that deals with a product that is not static. Language, we can increasingly see, is not a set of definable and prearranged tokens but a process of linguistic and cultural negotiation of meaning. Students have to develop their innate ability to use language for their own purposes in interaction with the purposes of other language users. Communicative syllabuses have been discussed partly through a recognition of this need, but a discussion of syllabus organisation is not enough, for the methodological implications are much more important. If languages are not, in principle, discrete, language teaching will not be served well if it is based on the assumption that we can specify the learner's product exactly. All syllabuses tend to concentrate on the product, or content. This paper argues that it is time to move away from syllabus definition, which has been adequately discussed for the current state of classroom practice.

Research on Second Language (L2) Acquisition, over the past ten years, has undergone substantial changes by shifting its focus of interest away from an analysis of linguistic structures alone, concentrating more on the learner himself or, rather, on the process of learning. It had become obvious that one of the major shortcomings in contrastive studies as well as in the usual kind of error analysis is that they lack thorough investigation of factors which determine the kind of approach a learner may take to acquire a second language. This again implies that it is more fruitful to study the process of learning itself instead of merely analysing its outputs. It is by now widely accepted that the learner takes an active part in the learning process and does not merely get trapped in structural gaps which linguists may find when comparing the source language (the learner's L1) and the target language (L2).

A communicative approach to language learning necessarily entails a commitment to reality. While it is quite possible to teach language as a system in a completely self-contained way, once we begin to try to teach language for use we are inevitably involved in the complexity of human interaction. We focus not on what learners know about the language system but on what they can do with it in the real world beyond the classroom.

This article describes the undirected learning (learning without explicit teaching) of tense markers in German by Spanish migrant workers. It will be shown that the remarkable differences the informants displayed in expressing the concept of tense are a function of the daily communicative routines which they developed in order to meet their communicative needs and demands. By examining very simplified learner varieties, I will demonstrate that a traditional grammatical analysis of tense is not capable of accounting for the wide range of expressions for temporal relations which were produced in an elicited Spanish-German translation task.

It is generally accepted that the aim of second or foreign language teaching is communicative competence; after a sequence of courses, students should be able to use the language (approximately and in certain fields of communication) as native speakers do. But how, for that matter, do native speakers use their language? An exhaustive answer to this question would certainly demand more than one paper. Attention will therefore be drawn to only two points that are important for the problem under discussion: correctness and communicative value.

From the point of view of linguists interested in pidginization, creolization, or other language contact phenomena, the continued presence of large numbers of southern European and North African foreign workers (called Gastaibeitei in Germany) and their families in northern European countries presents almost laboratory conditions for the investigation of the initial and subsequent stages of foreign language acquisition and development. Of particular interest is the fact that many of the languages involved here (Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) are typologically and genetically distinct; thus the situation is ideal for the study of common features of language development. If a Creole were to develop here, it would provide extremely valuable evidence for or against proposed universals.

The development of the communicative approach to language teaching and language learning, started only a few years back with the pilot work done in several centers for research in applied linguistics and by the language project group of the Council of Europe, has now reached a stage where it can safely be said that the pace has been set, and that a return to a strict linguistic or structural approach is not likely to occur. This does not mean, though, that all is for the best in the best of all possible language teaching worlds: all the pedagogical issues raised by the new approach have not been solved, nor thoroughly thought out yet, and our current practice, still in its exploratory stage, is largely based on intuitions and rules of thumb.

In recent years research on language acquisition (both L1 and L2) has gradually turned away from the domain of pure description towards dealing with problems of explanation. Most students of language development feel that it is somewhat insufficient to merely state the linguistic regularities and verbal strategies that according to the available production data appear to govern processes of language learning; rather, it seems desirable that the regularities observable in the learner's verbal behavior over time be in some way explained. Frequently, the term explanation is—implicitly rather than explicitly—understood as an attempt to reduce the specific linguistic regularities found in language learning processes to a set of some more general (i.e. non-linguistic) principles that will not only control other learning tasks as well, but will also govern man's mental activities as such (Slobin 1973, Schlesinger 1977, Larsen-Freeman 1976, Bever 1970, Wong-Fillmore 1976). Among those mental domains which appear to provide principles general enough to be applicable to problems of language, learning cognition or rather cognitive development turned out to be the most promising. As a consequence, a large number of studies focused on the attempt to explain formal linguistic properties of language learning processes in terms of more general regularities in man's cognitive abilities as they develop (Seliger 1980, Gass 1980, Felix 1976, Sinclair-de-Zwart 1973, Meisel 1979, Clahsen 1979). In fact, the term explanation frequently means little more than reducing language acquisition to aspects of cognitive development.

Why are pidgin utterances structured linguistically the way they are? Why, as has often been noted, do the linguistic structures of different pidgins tend to be more similar to each other than to the structure of the original languages involved in the specific pidgin? This has been noted as all the more surprising since these similarities also occur in cases where totally unrelated languages are involved, so that borrowing must be excluded; or where historical explanations cannot apply because there was no contact in the past at all. It will be suggested here that these similarities result from universal linguo-cognitive processing strategies which man employs in learning languages. Some of these strategies are universal in the sense that they apply in all acquisitional types so that pidgins have some properties which recur in all types of acquisition. Other strategies are more restricted in their applicability, for example, to the various types of second language (L2) acquisition.

During most of the present decade the foreign-language teaching profession in the United States has devoted prodigious efforts to the creation and publication of classroom exercises to develop the learners' ability to communicate. While the resulting diversity of activities bears testimony to the ingenuity of foreign language educators, it also manifests the lack of a coherent system for specifying objectives and creating or selecting appropriate activities for practice. That ubiquitous term “communicative competence” has lacked an operational definition. The concept of functional syllabus design, founded on the identification of the sociolinguistic factors that comprise communication events, suggests some means to fill that void. Once the learners' communication needs have been ascertained, inventories of functions, notions, and keys should be valuable tools for selecting appropriate linguistic exponents and generally determining course content.

In a communicative approach to language learning, the learner soon has to cope with a fundamental aspect of pragmatics: the argumentative and polemic function of language. From a pragmatic perspective, language is a tool we use not so much for describing or representing the world but for changing it, not for exchanging feelings of empathy, but for saying what we like and what we don't like, not just for expressing quiet satisfaction but for saying what is wrong, not for saying what we already know but for asking about what we want to know, not for explaining what we already have but for complaining about what we still lack and want to have: and for getting things done which would not be done if we did not ask for them and if we did not say why and how they have to be done.

The first public presentation of the ideas leading up to the Interlanguage (IL) Hypothesis occurred a decade ago at the Second International Congress of Applied Linguistics (Selinker 1969; presented in greater detail in Selinker 1972). At that time, it was stated that, in attempting to understand the phenomenon of second-language learning, the field was at a stage where there existed an “inability to unambiguously identify the phenomena we wish to study” (Selinker 1969:35). That first presentation of the IL notion focused on the “psychologically relevant data of second-language learning,” trying to describe what it was that should be studied; the paper attempted to provide some theoretical constructs which would help identify and explain that data.

As in most other countries, the interest in communicative language teaching has been considerable in Canada. This interest has influenced curriculum development, materials production, experimental teaching, and approaches to language testing; and a good deal of experience has been reported. As everywhere else, there is in Canada today a need to clarify what is meant by communicative language teaching (CLT). In paper appearing in the proceedings of the 1978 AILA Congress in Montreal, the present author has attempted to distinguish between the psychopedagogic and the sociolinguistic concepts under which CLT has been understood (Stern, 1978). As will be seen, the distinction underlies this discussion.

Recent research has focused increasingly on the good language learner (Rubin 1975; Naiman, Frohlich, and Stern 1978; Wesche 1977; Hosenfeld, 1976; Bialystok and Frohlich 1977a, 1977b; Cohen and Robbins 1976; Cohen 1977). A distinction that has gained currency is that between acquiring a second language and the conscious learning of the language through what Krashen (1977) refers to as “monitoring.” The studies reported in this paper concentrate on the identification of successful learning strategies—strategies that could actually be taught to language learners to help them maximize the benefits of conscious language learning. It is not very clear which behaviors actually promote success. Learners themselves may not pay conscious attention to what they do. In order to identify strategies, therefore, we must focus our attention on basic aspects of the language learning process and also on the interaction between the learner and the teacher.

Language is not simply a formal system of sounds, words, and syntactical structures; language also reaches into the domain of human interaction, which for its own part follows certain rules. Every native speaker assimilates individual social experiences characteristic of his own culture. These experiences inhere in statements that obtain their communicative significance through interpretation: “Die Bedeutung eines sprachlichen Zeichens kennen heisst wis en, wie es verwendet werden kann, d.h. wie man mit ihm handeln kann, welche Regeln für seinen Gebrauch gelten” (Heringer, 1977). Each society accumulates rules according to which concrete statements are interpreted abstractly and which are valid among communicating partners through common usage.

Most current foreign language teachers and those about to enter this profession have themselves learned the foreign language by structural methods. The curricula under which they studied are not likely to be exchanged for communicative curricula, as such decisions are not made at the classroom level. Because of these conditions, my paper will concentrate on pragmatic problems of a communicative methodology – problems that arise in attempting to answer the question: does the functional-notional approach, without being either a curriculum or a method, and while operating under the constraints of the present school system, help develop a framework and a set of principles that will help teachers make foreign language learning more communicative than it is at the moment?