Leaning a new foreign language in a bilingual context. Insights from the production of a German as a foreign language TV course

Abstract

Back in 2009, the author was invited by the Maltese national TV station to produce and present a 13-week German as a Foreign Language Course for beginners. Even if German as a foreign language is frequently viewed as a very difficult ‘impossible to learn’ subject (Cremona, 2020; Kovac & Mrsic, 2017), intending to facilitate learning, while the author used to script and design the resources and activities included in the programme, he always kept in mind that viewers in Malta are fluent bilingual speakers of Maltese and English (Caruana et al., 2011). In this light, as the main sets of data, this paper uses the recordings of the 13-week TV series and the responses of the viewers. The result of this social-semiotic multimodal analysis indicates that teaching the new foreign language through references from the two languages viewers already knew before watching the TV series (i.e. Maltese and English) helped the learners to familiarize themselves more rapidly with German which is frequently viewed as a difficult language to learn. The main conclusion presented in the paper suggests that while it is important to avoid direct translations from the target language, references linking languages not only help viewers increase their FL linguistic competencies but also help them replace foreign language anxiety with student motivation.