Creative Literacy for Teachers of German

Subject: German
Level: Secondary
Age Group: 14 - 16
Order Number: 9102

Instead of considering the appreciation of literature as the optional preserve of Advanced Level syllabuses, why not attempt an early discovery of literary texts? Opportunities are provided, even at a basic level, to inspire and surprise learners with creative tasks and projects based on a selection of authors and genres. As in volume one, the focus on language production means that a didactic and yet creative access to the texts is secured through the learner's own linguistic development.

Concrete poems can lure beginners to practise the sounds of German whilst playing with phonetic possibilities within purely acoustic or, if preferred, lexical parameters, but they also show a visually, and at times emotionally, intense and impressive use of grammatical structures, from adjectival agreement to tense and sentence formation. The German and Austrian poets selected include Kurt Schwitters, Ernst Jandl, Erich Fried and Otto Rudolph Wierner. Romantic fairy-tales and lend themselves to a revision or an extended practice of the imperfect tense and to guided pieces of writing with humour and irony if not moral pertinence. A choice of short stories by Frank Kafka, accompanied by summaries of narratives, lists of themes and grids for text analyses, should encourage teachers to regard them as suitable material for their students, who equipped with a conceptual and linguistic framework, will feel up to the task.