History, Literature, and the Composition and Conversation Class.

DURING SPRING QUARTER OF 1986 I SERVED AS visiting assistant professor in the Department of German at the University of California, Irvine. Among the courses I had been asked to teach was an undergraduate class in advanced composition and conversation. As the spring quarter approached, I learned that this "skills" course had as its topical subject matter the Weimar Republic and the rise of German fascism. This, I thought, was a bold step in foreign language pedagogy, an assessment based on the following assumptions: 1) students learn best in a composition and conversation class when they are encouraged to speak and write freely, unencumbered by any obligation to have grasped any subject other than "the language itself" (vocabulary, syntax, grammar, idiom, etc.); 2) most American college students today lack extensive knowledge of national histories; they thus cannot be expected to draw on much substantial prior knowledge of that period of German history that was to comprise the substantive content of the course.1 The dilemma I anticipated was that I could either focus on improving the students' speaking and writing proficiency, or I could teach them about the Weimar Republic and the rise of German fascism, but I was not at all certain how to combine the two effectively.2 Composition and conversation courses are by definition classes which preclude student passivity. How then to eliminate the possibility that my students would become merely the passive recipients of historical information about Germany from 1918 to 1945?3 What role, if any, could literature play in this process? The course had been conceived at Irvine as the third-quarter component in a series of three composition and conversation classes that also addressed three different periods in twentiethcentury German history. As the students advanced to more sophisticated oral and written skills, they moved backwards in time. In other words, the first course in the sequence dealt with German history, politics, and culture since 1968; the second treated developments and trends between 1945 and 1968; the final course addressed the years 1918 to 1945. Most of the students taking the third course in spring quarter had thus taken the first two components of the sequence and had therefore already been exposed to problems in modern German history even though only roughly sixty percent of the thirteen students in the class were German majors. At the same time, one should bear in mind that the farther back one goes in time, the more alien the historical period to the average American college student, even at Irvine, where most students came to the course with their curiosity already aroused. With the exception of two first-year students and one graduate student from another department, the students enrolled in this course were all juniors and seniors. Most of them did not come from German-speaking backgrounds, although the majority of them had learned German via the "Natural Method."4 Several had had living and working experience in German-speaking countries under the auspices of a summer work program. From what I was able to observe, I would say that the combination of the "Natural Method" in the initial language-learning stages and the relatively frequent use made of opportunities to live abroad contributed to a classroom situation in which students were not generally inhibited from speaking, even if their contributions were often marked with grammatical errors and historical inaccuracies. As taught previously, the course relied The Modern Language Journal, 72, i (1988) 0026-7902/88/0001/013 $1.50/0 ?1988 The Modern LanguageJournal