Intercultural Stereotypes and the Teaching of German.

Stereotypes and stereotyping are popular topics these days as teachers of German redefine their discipline, their pedagogical role, and their teaching practice in the light of recent theories of reading and new approaches to interculturality and interdisciplinarity. ' Sufficient progress has been made in the exploration of individual aspects of these questions that one can now attempt to establish their congruence, to arrive at a broader notion of how students approach the culture of the German-speaking countries and how teachers should assist them to do so in a meaningful and responsible way. I shall attempt to do just that by looking at two basic sets of questions. First, what are intercultural stereotypes: How do they arise and how do they portray Germany and the Germans? 2 Second, how do, can, and should the process of stereotyping and the existence of specific stereotypes affect classroom practice in the teaching of German? Before taking up each of these sets of questions in turn, I shall discuss briefly the changing understanding of culture and interculturality within the profession. As a culture in itself, the profession has a tradition of distinguishing "high" and "low" culture and of putting this distinction to work in deciding what is worthy of being taught and how it is to be approached. In the last several years, however, there have also been attempts to re-integrate the notion of culture; in other words, to arrive at a broad definition of culture which subsumes these distinctions.3 Building on the work of H. Ned Seelye and Howard L. Nostrand, I would propose a working definition of culture as "the totality of characteristic patterns of thought, behavior, and self-expression through which individual members of a national, linguistic, or ethnic group or subgroup react to, make sense of, and seek to satisfy, basic human needs. "4 Even an adequate definition of culture, however, would leave open the question of how members of one culture view and respond to individuals, artifacts, institutions, and behaviors from other cultures; and the consequences which these understandings of culture and interculturality, taken together, have for classroom practice. Traditionally, four related factors have circumscribed the classroom "practice" of culture: (1) culture was used as a motivator: in the positive sense, this meant that it was a (more or less keenly anticipated) break from the routine; in the negative sense, it meant that culture was a convenient rubric which could be employed whenever teachers and students were not capable of real teaching and learning, or there were a few minutes which needed to be filled; (2) culture involved the bringing in of "realia" or, more frequently, the use of audio-visual materials; this could result in a largely passive experience of culture by the students; (3) culture was seen as a number of facts about the country (countries) whose language the students were learning; (4) these facts were treated as background information to the real business of the class, mastery of the target language. As such, they sometimes took on the character of items from Trivial Pursuit-little-known, perhaps intriguing, but unconnected bits of information. Overall, then, the scheduling and the presentation of culture meant that it was not treated systematically, but as discrete moments and items of nonessential infor-