Abstract
This practice article examines the design, implementation and impacts of a collaborative German language learning (LL) field trip in the United States through the conceptual framework of LL and teaching beyond the classroom. We explore the affordances of semi-structured out-of-class experiences in supporting world language students’ target language proficiency while addressing the crucial Communities goal area of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages World-Readiness standards. In addition to their effects on students, we consider the potential impacts of LL experiences beyond the classroom on schools and school administrations. Considerations for theory, research and practice are discussed.
Keywords
Introduction
At the heart of world language (WL) education in the United States are the key goals of communication and cultural understanding. To meet these goals, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages suggests that WL teachers provide opportunities for students to make connections and comparisons between their own and their global communities (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, n.d.). Specifically, the Communities goal area of the field's WL standards encourages learners to “use the language both within and beyond the classroom to interact and collaborate in their community and the globalized world” (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, n.d.: 1). Despite the Communities goal area standing as one of the five WL standards, it remains underemphasised in the field and less frequently targeted in instruction compared to the others (Cutshall, 2012). Cutshall states that WL teachers should recognize that “it isn’t necessary to go halfway around the world to find a community,” and “how important it is to connect to the communities in your own neighborhood” (Cutshall, 2012: 33). This is an essential understanding given the lack of financial support and professional autonomy experienced by many language teachers.
Building upon these issues, this paper details an innovative language excursion experience that I (first author) organized for my secondary level German WL students in the United States. The out-of-class excursion took the form of a field trip to the Heifer International (HI) headquarters conducted primarily in German. I collaborated with a German-speaking volunteer at the non-profit organization to design a thematic unit on Umweltfreundlichkeit (environmental friendliness) and Nachhaltigkeit (sustainability) within which our field trip was embedded. Before highlighting its rationale, design and implementation, we ground the immersive language learning (LL) experience within the growing literature on LL and teaching beyond the classroom (LLBTC) (Reinders et al., 2022). Specifically, we situate the creation of semi-structured LL experiences beyond the classroom as an innovative means of addressing the Communities standard ( American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, n.d.).
The Teaching Context
This work took place when I (first author) was teaching German at a public high school in a predominantly rural state in the southeastern United States. The German programme at the school comprised four class levels (German I–IV) between grades 9 and 12 and aimed to support students’ continual growth in German proficiency and intercultural competence. The school was in the state's capital city representing the urban centre of a larger metropolitan area. Like many schools in the United States, our school district faced some pressure from the state's department of education to increase student achievement. Thus, while teachers of core subjects such as English language arts, mathematics and science faced some scrutiny and constraints to improve students’ scores on standardized tests, school and district administrations paid little attention to my students’ performance in German or how or what I taught.
Reason for the Innovation
Our state's standards for WL education, based largely on the communicative standards from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (n.d.) (i.e., interpretive, presentational and interpersonal modes), provided WL teachers like me with significant pedagogical and curricular autonomy. This combination of autonomy and administrative indifference towards my German programme was unique; being the only German teacher at the school with no school-mandated or district-mandated curriculum or examinations reflected a schoolwide lack of value towards WL education, yet also offered me the freedom to approach the standards in ways that best fit my students’ needs and motivations. Similarly, I had always wanted to get my language students out of the classroom so that they could communicate with others in German. Our city and its surrounding areas, however, offered few to no opportunities for this. Like the WL teachers described by Cutshall (2012), I struggled to incorporate the Communities standard into my teaching. Thus, I made the decision to organize something on my own in which I would bring my German II students to somewhere in the community to learn German.
LLTBC
The framework of LLTBC concerns how students engage in LL outside of the traditional school-based setting (Reinders and Benson, 2017; Richards, 2015). While LLTBC is most often characterized in terms of autonomous LL experiences, there is theoretical headroom within the framework for the value of instructor-planned, semi-structured pedagogical experiences (Benson, 2011; Reinhardt, 2022), especially those with emphases on meaning and language use (Lai et al., 2015). Reinders et al. suggest that a stronger understanding is needed regarding the roles of forces “other than the learners, in shaping their learning experience, and the interaction of the formal and informal components of language education” (Reinders et al., 2022: 4), echoing Thorne and Hellermann's call for “interfacing LBC [learning beyond the classroom] with instructed learning environments’’ (Thorne and Hellermann, 2022: 36). To this end, Reinders and Benson highlight a selection of examples of LLTBC comprising out-of-class “projects that have a major impact on the shape of the curriculum and what happens in class” (Reinders and Benson 2017: 572) through which teachers and learners bridge teacher-organized pedagogy and curriculum with LLTBC in the form of out-of-class excursions. Language excursions, as examples of LLTBC, present a novel way to connect language students with local and global communities.
Description of the Innovation
Identifying a Community Connection
I began by calling local organizations, including the local HI headquarters, to see what opportunities they could offer. To my surprise, someone at the non-profit shared that they had a volunteer tour guide who spoke German: Lara, a German expatriate. Lara was excited about the notion of collaborating on a project such as this and, being highly knowledgeable about the HI organization, had many ideas about how to embed this field trip into a thematic unit on Umweltfreundlichkeit and Nachhaltigkeit. Lara and I began to meet regularly to plan the experience for my German II class, which comprised approximately 25 students. As Level II WL students are expected to work within the Novice–Mid proficiency level, our goal was to foremost provide significant amounts of contextualized, comprehensible input via the interpretive mode (i.e. understanding heard, read, or viewed target language (TL) messages) (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, n.d.), as well as initial opportunities for students’ interpersonal and presentational communication concentrated around engaging and compelling global themes (Henshaw and Hawkins, 2022).
Planning the Thematic Unit
Founded in 1944, the mission of HI is to end global poverty through sustainable giving and community-driven training. The foundational principles behind HI can be summarised by the quote, “Nicht eine Tasse Milch, sondern eine Kuh.” (“Not a cup of milk, but a cow”). Charitable donations to HI are used to contribute livestock and training to address challenges faced by regions and localities internationally. Through these contributions, communities can create sustainable infrastructure and income for the future. Building from this for our thematic unit, Lara and I focused on the contribution of livestock towards meeting these goals. We identified an essential question to guide the unit: “Wofür sind Tiere nützlich?” (How are animals useful?). More specifically, we focused on the sustainable impact of animals, namely “The Seven Ms” of the organization. Our unit referred to them as “die sieben nützliche Dinge” (“the seven useful things”) because the German words did not begin with the same letter: Geld (money) Materialen (materials) Fleisch (meat) Milch (milk) Hoffnung (hope, motivation) Dung (manure) Muskelkraft (strength, muscle)
As the goals of the class and unit were mainly communicative, the lessons leading up to the field trip aimed to promote students’ comprehension of spoken and written TL around words and ideas relevant to our essential question (“Wofür sind Tiere nützlich?”). I provided students’ with considerable input at their Novice–Mid proficiency level through various activities and multimodal texts (Glisan and Donato, 2017). I frequently employed dialogic questioning in which we would discuss pictures illustrating the usefulness of animals, actions related to service or giving, and the history of the organization, often using questions such as “What do you see? How might the people feel? How does the picture make you wonder?” to incite conversations. Using graphic organizers, the students and I read excerpts from online articles and watched videos together, which we used further for interpretive and interpersonal activities. If a video happened to be in English, I would simply mute the audio and use the visuals as a springboard for communication. Students also engaged in information gap tasks (Henshaw and Hawkins, 2022) with their peers for interpersonal communication, as well as opportunities to present their understandings and perspectives to others through writing and speaking. The purpose of these lessons was to prepare them to successfully navigate a new context where German was spoken and written by someone other than me and their peers.
Visiting HI Headquarters
Our visit to HI headquarters began in the morning with welcoming remarks in German from Lara. She greeted us all and welcomed many students individually as they entered and sat down. Next, she played a short video about the organization's impact in the world. Although the video was in English, it provided a context for her follow-up speech with probing questions embedded throughout. The questions, which Lara and I had designed together, included themes and words that students were well familiar with. Students also had the opportunity to ask Lara rehearsed or improvised questions in German about information about the organization they were interested in. Next, she took our group on a tour of the HI headquarters building. She described in German how the building was designed and built to be grün (green) and umweltfreundlich (environmentally friendly), which included the use of Solarzellenplatten (solar panels), locally sourced Holz (wood) and Stahl (steel), raised flooring for cooling and heating, natürliche Belichtung (natural lighting), and native Pflanzen (plants). Although students did not understand every individual word she said during the tour, they were able to effectively comprehend the meaning of the messages she communicated with them.
After the tour, we transitioned to a Schnitzeljagd (scavenger hunt) activity in the interactive museum exhibit. The museum area included various interactive themed exhibits, including a history timeline of the organization, education, and sustainable agriculture, among others. Despite the exhibits being in English, Lara and I had worked to create questions in German that students would respond to by exploring the area with a partner. Students chatted busily and moved between exhibits. After about 20 minutes, we returned to the conference hall to discuss the questions. Lara sought out responses from the students and we all worked together in German to discuss potential answers. Our focus was less on what or who was correct, but rather creating a space for collective dialogue in German around the themes from the day and their experiences exploring the exhibit area. Our trip ended with a communal lunch and a group photograph before returning to the school.
Reflection
Impact on Students
One moment from the field trip clearly portrays the impact of this experience on the students. At the start of her brief lecture, Lara moved towards the students and shared “Heifer hilft Armut in der Welt zu beenden” (“Heifer helps to end poverty in the world”). She paused. I looked over to my group of students to see most of them nodding their heads in understanding. It was a special moment – the first time any of them had ever communicated outside of the classroom in German with someone other than me. Beginning the day with an instance of comprehensible German provided a boost in their confidence whereby they immediately understood Lara's transmission of meaning. The students and I reflected in class as a group during our next class meeting. Students overwhelmingly expressed how wonderful it felt to not only understand what a first language German speaker was saying to them, but also to have the chance to respond and pose questions themselves around a topic that was familiar and close to them. Through these experiences, students perceived the value and use of WLs directly. In the days and weeks after the trip, the growth in students’ dedication and engagement were apparent. It was the highlight of our school year together.
Impact on School Administration and Colleagues
School administration required that at least two teachers or school leaders attend any activities taking place away from campus. I chose to invite one of our school administrators because I wanted him to see the outcome of WLs teaching in action. Like the students, he was able to experience German being used for authentic communication beyond the classroom. On the bus ride back to school, we talked about what he thought of the trip. He shared how, while he understood none of the German, he was impressed with the students’ ability to understand what Lara was saying and communicate with each other. Given the need for American public schools to publicize the great work they do, the new connection between the school and HI forged through this collaboration presented the school with yet another talking point and advertisement. In addition, our thematic unit and field trip influenced students at other nearby schools. After sharing about it in a professional development session, another German teacher in our school district led the same trip with Lara using the curriculum we had developed.
Implications for Theory and Research
How does a course-based language field trip such as this fit into the framework of LLTBC? Reinhardt states that “bridging LLTBC into formal curricula while maintaining learner autonomy is a considerable balancing act” (Reinhardt, 2022: 18), and we, the authors, agree. Despite Lara and I designing the curriculum and excursion activities, the communicative nature of the students’ experiences were autonomous. Students engaged in spontaneous interpersonal communication with their peers and Lara, and they interpreted the spoken and written German based on their background experiences and identities ( American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, n.d.). As the overall goals of the curriculum and field trip were to strengthen students’ German proficiency, students’ community connections and autonomous communication at and just above their proficiency levels were the engagement we were looking for. In this way, the focus of the trip was much more on natural communication and implicit learning rather than teacher-instructed pedagogy and explicit language instruction. Thus, this innovative practice contributes to the conversation within the field regarding the capacity of semi-structured, pedagogical LLTBC experiences to provide autonomy, a focus on meaning, and implicit learning (Reinders and Benson, 2017).
Future Pedagogical Directions
Language field trips beyond the classroom such as this are inherently flexible and thus adaptable to a variety of contexts. Although they will undoubtedly represent a diverse range of topics and objectives, they will likely share a strong emphasis on promoting students’ effective TL communication. When planning for an LLTBC experience, language teachers should consider innovative ways of comprehensively engaging students across the three modes of communication – interpretive, presentational and interpersonal – during language field trips such as this (Henshaw and Hawkins, 2022). One potential approach could be the inclusion of pre-activities and post-activities or assessments targeting one or more of these modes, such as written reflections, oral presentations, or other collaborative projects (see Glisan and Donato, 2017; Henshaw and Hawkins, 2022). Yet although teacher-organized activities are needed, informal spaces for autonomous language use, exploration and curiosity are also essential for effective LLTBC experiences (Reinders and Benson, 2017). Finally, given the financial barriers many students face, teachers should consider opportunities for receiving funding to cover expenses such as transportation and food, which may prohibit some students from attending.
The affordances and constraints of specific contexts illuminate what makes a practice innovative. Although field trips may be common in other school areas, in a city and state with little to no representation of German as well as indifference towards the value of WLs in kindergarten through to grade 12 schools, this curricular collaboration with Lara and the trip to HI likely would not normally have happened. Despite these factors, our efforts to bring German learning beyond the classroom were successful and had many meaningful impacts, especially on my students. It represented for them an initial recognition that they were, in fact, effective German communicators. Most importantly, it demonstrated that the distance between their local and global communities was closer than might be expected (Cutshall, 2012).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
