Charles J. James

Memory, Meaning & Method. A View of Language Teaching

I. Memory 1. What We Remember 2. Kinds of Memory 3. Memory at Work: Basic Processes 4. Processes of Memory: What Happens within the Files 5. Managing Memory: The Mechanical Side 6. Memory and the Whole Person II. Meaning 7. The Meaning of Speaking 8. Interpersonal Meanings 9. The Language Class as a Small Group III. Method 10. Three Views of Method 11. Six Methods 12. Tradition, Diversity and Oakleys Thesis

The Language of Death in German Newspapers

No one speaks willingly of death. This is just as true of Germans as it is of Americans. And yet there are notable differences between the two cultures in their public expressions of grief and condolence. As a rule, the death notices in an American newspaper are restricted to one or two columns of a single page of newsprint. In a German newspaper death notices may be spread over two or more pages, with each notice taking up considerable space surrounded by a black border. A death notice in America has the length of a want ad; in Germany it can not only be as long as an advertisement, but at times can take up as much as half a page, depending on the importance of the person who has died and the expense the relatives wish to go to in order to honor the deceaseds memory.

Swap-Shop: "Fantasia-Land.".

The following text was composed by a young woman in a secondary school in Dresden. The story she tells is typical of many that young people could tell about the changes in their lives over the past two years. It is presented here with little editing and no further comment. It speaks for itself. The two short texts that follow it were written by students in a second-semester German class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the Spring Semester of 1991. The assignment was to describe the girl and to describe the disco, each in twenty to thirty words. The result here is a composite of the summaries that twenty students in the class wrote on the assignment. There were other activities related to the language of the text itself, such as isolating reflexive sentences and passive sentences, which are well represented in this story. However, the student summaries revealed a greater interest in the topic than in the grammar that supported it.