Читать книгу Ugandan Children's Literature and Its Implications for Cultural and Global Learning in TEFL - Stephanie Schaidt - Страница 7

The single story creates a stereotype and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. They make a story become the only story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie1

In the face of fears which are time and again raised in parts of the population that their culture could be diluted by aspects of incoming ‘foreign’ cultures, it seems indispensable to place a strong focus in German education on cultural and global learning. As language and culture are considered to be closely interrelated and it is assumed that one may not be taught without the other (Byram, 1998; Kramsch, 1998; Risager, 2007), the foreign language classroom plays a special role in this respect.

Culture is an ambiguous term and quite difficult to capture. Over the last centuries, very many different understandings of culture have developed and in the present time various concepts of culture(s) also coexist. The normative concept of culture as high-culture only that evolved in the 19^th century has been largely replaced today by a functional-dynamic understanding of culture. Nevertheless, static concepts of culture continue to be drawn on. Herder’s (1967) understanding of cultures as separate, homogeneous islands or spheres that are ethnically consolidated has been questioned and declared obsolete (e.g. Welsch, 2010) but it has also been taken up by other scholars (e.g. Huntington, 1998). Racist and xenophobic lines of argument repeatedly utilise a static concept of culture to justify marginalisation and exclusion. Increasingly, however, scholars also point to concepts such as hybridity (Bhabha, 1990, 1994) and transculturality (Welsch, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2010) and perceive culture as a text or discourse.

Discussions on cultural learning have already formed an integral part of pedagogy and foreign language didactics in Germany for many years. In the last two centuries, influenced by neighbouring disciplines, cultural learning in the foreign language classroom has gone through various changes. With the widening of the concept of culture, the didactic approach to teaching and learning about cultural aspects has also broadened. Approaches that focus on culture as monolithic entities such as many Landeskunde [regional studies] approaches and Fremdverstehen [understanding of the other] have been replaced or complemented by approaches that take processes of meaning creation between representatives of different cultures (intercultural learning) and blurrings and transgressions of boundaries (transcultural learning) or global topics (global education) into account.

Fiction has been assigned a particular potential in the context of cultural and global learning. In the 1990s, scholars of the Graduate School “Understanding Otherness” in Gießen, for example, researched widely on Fremdverstehen in literary didactics (Bredella & Christ, 1995; Christ & Legutke, 1996), and since the new millennium important impulses have also been provided by reference to postmodern and postcolonial discourses (Alter, 2015; Fäcke, 2006; Freitag-Hild 2010; Hallet, 2002, 2007).

Much of the research that has been done in the field is located at a theoretical level. Up to today, only few studies have looked into cultural learning with literary texts empirically (see for example Burwitz-Melzer, 2003; Fäcke, 2006; Freitag-Hild, 2010). Particularly lower and intermediate grades of secondary education remain largely unresearched. What Burwitz-Melzer lamented at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is still true today:

Für niedrigere Jahrgänge, also für ein weniger fortgeschrittenes, sprachlich weniger gewandtes und oft weniger leseerfahrenes Schülerpublikum, dessen Curriculum außerdem noch maßgeblich vom Lehrbuch bestimmt wird, lassen sich bisher allerdings kaum Unterrichtsvorschläge und Fallstudien finden. [For lower years, that is for students who are less advanced, linguistically less competent and often with less reading experience, and whose curriculum on top of this is still significantly determined by the course book, fewer teaching suggestions and case studies may be found.] (Burwitz-Melzer, 2003, p. 93; my translation)

Empirical studies, however, provide valuable insights, for example, into teaching materials, teaching procedures and learners’ mental processes in the EFL classroom from which conclusions can be drawn on how to create effective learning arrangements for the students. Therefore, there is still need for more empirical studies in the field.

Furthermore, teaching African cultures and literatures remains largely overlooked in foreign language didactics. Acknowledging that in the last few years “the German EFL curriculum has been considerably extended”, Gohrisch & Grünkemeier (2012b, p. 11) point out that “[c]ompared to other postcolonial regions, Africa is less well represented in German school and university curricula”. Taking a cursory glance at school books used in Berlin and Brandenburg they state that post-apartheid South Africa is the only representative, “while ‘the rest’ of the continent is silenced” (ibid., p. 21). My own look at school books in Bayern and Baden-Württemberg confirmed this observation.2

In foreign language didactics research in Germany, ‘Africa’ has also been largely neglected. Although in the last few years a number of articles and volumes have been published which discuss the teaching of ‘the new’/postcolonial English cultures and literatures (Doff & Schulze-Engler, 2011a; Eisenmann, 2015; Eisenmann, Grimm, & Volkmann, 2010b; Schulze-Engler, 2002), the focus on ‘Africa’ usually remains restricted to South Africa here as well. The volume Listening to Africa (Gohrisch & Grünkemeier, 2012a) seems to be the only volume in German foreign language didactics research targeted at university and high school teachers that focalises different African countries.

Concrete teaching examples by scholars and practitioners centred on African countries are rare, as well. In 2010, when the football World Cup took place in South Africa, a number of foreign language didactics journals dedicated an issue to South Africa (see The Many Faces of South Africa (Bildungshaus Schulbuchverlage, 2010); South Africa (Kieweg & Voigt, 2010)) and South Africa-related topics are occasionally also targeted in other issues (e.g. Decke-Cornill, 1994). Other countries are largely ignored and many articles in journals still focus on ‘Africa’ in general, seemingly homogenising a complete continent (Brose, 2015; Feuerle, 2007; Kazaki, 2014). The book Africa Postcolonial Experiences (Teichmann, 2009), published in the Schöningh Discover Series and edited by Thaler, appears to be a rather isolated example by a school publisher that presents teaching examples which take into account a variety of African countries.

Against the background of these shortcomings, the present study focuses on the intermediate levels of foreign language teaching and a country that has not yet gained much attention in TEFL in Germany, i.e. Uganda. The research seeks empirical insights into the mental processes of Year 9 students in Germany when they engage with Ugandan children’s literature within the scope of an extensive reading project. Students’ approaches to this literature, to ‘foreign’ aspects, their (de)construction and reflection processes are analysed. Taking postmodern and postcolonial discourses into account, implications for cultural and global learning in the EFL classroom and literary didactics are deduced.

With the focus on Ugandan children’s fiction in the present study, the scope of research in foreign language didactics is extended and a path that turns away from a homogenising approach to ‘Africa’ taken. However, I also repeatedly make use of the adjective ‘African’ in my study. As my research deals with (de)constructions of ‘otherness’, it is of particular importance to critically reflect upon the terminology that is applied, which is done in the following paragraphs.

The term ‘African’ is problematic as it feigns homogeneity, which is untenable with respect to a large continent that is in fact extraordinarily heterogeneous (e.g. concerning its history, linguistic diversity, etc.). Giving various examples of the heterogeneity of the continent Taiye Selasi (2013) points to this issue of generalising:

Of all the continents, Africa is the least eligible for generalization. Still, not a week goes by that I don’t hear someone use the adjective “African” and wonder: where exactly, in your mind, is this Africa of which you speak? What language do they speak in this Africa? What is the weather like? What are we thinking for food, clothing, music, worship, topography? Are we imagining the snow-capped mountains of Cape Town or the grasslands of Nairobi or the urban sprawl of Cairo or the cacophonous chaos of Lagos? Or are we rather imagining an animated scene from Disney’s The Lion King, a yellow-orange vista just before twilight with drums playing softly in the distance? (ibid., p. 6)

With respect to the term ‘African literature’, a generalisation is also questionable. In her talk, Selasi proclaims that “African Literature Doesn’t Exist”. She argues that

[i]n order to believe in “African literature”—to employ the term as if it possessed some cogent, knowable meaning—we must believe that the word African possesses some cogent meaning as well. But what? The African continent consists of 55 states recognized by the UN. That’s roughly the same as Europe’s 50, though I’ve never heard of anyone placing authors from, say, Switzerland, Serbia, Spain and Sweden on a panel of ‘European writers.’ […] The trouble is obvious: continents are naturally formed landmasses comprised of numerous countries. If states make suspicious categories for art, continents are closer to useless. (ibid., p. 5)

As an alternative way to classify literature, Selasi suggests putting a stronger focus on the identity of the writing not the writer: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we classified literature not by country but by content: the love story, the city novel, the novel of the nation-state, the war novel, the bildungsroman?” (p. 14).

It has to be noted, however, that the adjective ‘African’ and the denomination ‘African literature’, as well as references to nationality and national literature, also play an important role in the context of the pan-African movement (W.E.B. Du Bois, Léopold Senghor, Jomo Kenyetta, Kwame Nkrumah) and the development of a counter-discourse to Western literature in the mid-twentieth century. Following the political disengagement from the colonisers, a period of pan-Africanism/nationalism ensued in many African countries. Writers “wanted to exhibit and defend African culture against the Western rationalisation of colonialism” (Ojaide, 1995, p. 5). Furthermore, influenced by the fact that they are frequently perceived as ambassadors for the African continent, even today writers with Nigerian, Ugandan, etc. roots who live in the Global North also often describe themselves as African. Adichie (2009), for example, states:

I must say that before I went to the US I didn’t consciously identify as African. But in the US whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity. And in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country.

Since I draw on scholarship in my study that engages with anti-colonial critique and repeatedly talks of an African counter-discourse, I do not see a way out of this dilemma and occasionally make use of the terms ‘African’ and ‘African literature’ as well. The same issue of being both problematic and inevitable applies to the term ‘Western’. Similarly to ‘African’, this term may evoke essentialising concepts of culture; as a counter-concept to ‘African’ it cannot, however, be avoided in my study.

In addition to this, the colour adjectives Black and white necessitate reflection. Referring to a person or groups of people, they must not be understood as biological or personal features but as historical and sociopolitical categorories in my study. In order to accentuate the constructedness of these terms, I put the term white into italics and capitalise Black, as it serves as an emancipatory self-denomination (see Marmer & Sow, 2015a, p. 7). In students’ quotes taken from the questionnaires, reading diaries and interviews, these adjectives are, however, not marked in this way to avoid altering their meaning.

Furthermore, certain terms with respect to foreign language didactics need clarification in my study. It is important to recognise that terminology in the scholarship of first, second and/or foreign language acquisition/learning is not consistent. The first language a child learns is interchangeably referred to as first language (L1), primary language, mother tongue or native language in the respective contributions. Concerning other languages that are learnt after the L1, a few linguists differentiate between second language (L2) acquisition and foreign language learning (e.g. Quirk & Greenbaum, 1972) whereas the majority of scholars use second language acquisition as an umbrella term to cover the learning of all languages different from the L1. When a difference between second language acquisition and foreign language learning is made, the former refers to the learning of a non-native language in the environment in which it is spoken (e.g. learning English in the UK, USA and Australia), whereas the latter refers to the learning of a non-native language not spoken by the surrounding community and primarily learnt in the classroom, for example when English is learnt in Germany (Ellis, 1994, pp. 11–12; Gass & Selinker, 2001, p. 5). Since the term ‘English as a second language’ is also commonly applied to the English spoken in Uganda (see Kachru, 1986), I consider the differentiation between second language and foreign language to be important in my study, while acknowledging that the distinctions are usually not clear-cut. At times, however, I also quote sources in which scholars use second language acquisition and second language as generic terms.

Now that the focus of this research has been introduced and important terms reflected upon, I wish to provide an outline of the present study. The thesis is divided into ten chapters. Chapter 1 is concerned with an introduction to the role of culture in the EFL classroom and offers an overview of the objectives of the present study. Chapter 2 critically discusses relevant concepts and developments in the fields of cultural and global learning. Chapter 3 provides insights into literary didactics in the EFL classroom. Particular focus is placed on the use of children’s fiction at lower and intermediate levels of secondary school and extensive reading in this context. The fourth chapter is devoted to the literary basis of my study, Ugandan children’s literature. Selected genres, topics and titles are analysed and their relevance for the present study is pointed out. Chapter 6 and 7 present the research findings of my study. While Chapter 6 focuses on individual cases, Chapter 7 develops a thematic structure across cases. Chapter 8 discusses the research findings and suggests implications for TEFL. In the ninth chapter, I reflect upon my research design and methodology in the retrospective and in Chapter 10 the findings of my study are finally summarised, critically reflected and suggestions for future studies are made.