Bilingualism and its effect on learning 'impossible' German. Insights from a Maltese multimodal case study

Abstract

In his well-cited article, The Awful German Language prolific author Mark Twain (1880) whose writing skills are acclaimed internationally by many (Andersen 1971), admits and almost apologetically surrenders to the fact that he felt defeated at the impossible mission of learning German as a Foreign Language. Through my daily mission as a teacher educator while preparing prospective teachers of German as a Foreign Language and during my very regular collaborations with teachers and students in secondary schools German as a Foreign Language learning contexts, I encounter many young and old ‘Mark Twains’ who struggle and almost stumble when facing this language, which while on the one hand, enjoys a great prestige among the other popular languages learnt in Malta, is notorious for being the most daunting and demanding foreign language one can come in contact with (Cremona 2015). Similar findings highlight that learners of German perceive the language as more difficult than other foreign languages they learn (Kovac and Mrsic 2017). Frequently, this difficulty seems bigger because of negative student representations of Germany and of people living in Germany. These representations are usually based on one or a few stereotypes to the extent that very limited dominant essentialist discourses end up being treated as a predominant belief (McGarty, Yzerbyt and Spears 2002). Students frequently still define Germany through war clichés transmitted through books, movies and/or the media, or orally from one generation to the next (Crawford 2005). Additionally, Du’s (1998) findings about students in Holland show how the predominantly negative representations are frequently counterbalanced through ambivalent ideology-laden representations viewing Germany as mighty and “big” (Du 1998:37).