Perspectives for research and teaching

Hence despite their own individual, possibly culturally influenced experience and understanding, both teachers and learners - the students - have proved capable of approaching each other and creating something new. Nevertheless, many questions remain open:

What notion of teaching did the the students really have in their minds at the start of the course? Here concepts from cognitive linguistics, in particular research into framing - schemas of interpretation that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events - can help in the investigation. Recently, promising approaches in this direction have been formulated by Claudia Fraas (2006).

And what are Chinese courses in action really like, when they are just monocultural? Is it true what Chinese teachers in Nanjing claim of their classes? And what are the differences to how courses are run in Germany? Here too we just don't know enough. For this reason, the start of culture-contrastive investigations is planned for this summer.

Last of all: China is a vast country. With 52 different ethnic groups, a population of over 1,300 million, and the distinctions city-country and north-south, differences, tensions and conflicts are inevitable. Facts like these, not only on China, have to be taken into account by any research. Furthermore, as demanded in recent research on teaching in Germany (e.g. Spiegel 2006), individuality must not be neglected as a factor either.

What are the implications of all these considerations for German as a Foreign Language, both as a university course and in the classroom? Teacher training or teaching material which with respect to what is taught, the style of teaching, or types of spoken interaction all too readily assumes the inevitable culture-specific nature of phenomena, or places, for example, great value on cultural marking in interaction, pretends that things are much simpler than they really are. Here there remains a lot too do for any research which sees itself as multi-perspective and differentiated: theoretically, empirically and practically.