CLIL in Germany

Bilingual geography lessons have a long tradition at the Sorbian Grammar School in Bautzen. "Witajće k nam! – Herzlich Willkommen." When you drive into the city of Bautzen in Saxony, you are welcomed by bilingual road signs. This is because in the district of the same name, there are also some 40,000 Sorbs living alongside the Germans. They are the descendants of the Western Slavonic Milceni and Lusatian tribes who in the sixth century settled in the region of today's Upper and Lower Lusatia.

Bilingualism is an important part of the region's cultural and political life and youngsters at the Sorbian Grammar School in Budyšin, the Sorbian name for Bautzen, are being prepared for it.

The institution has been in existence since 1947. It began as a Sorbian secondary school, later becoming an extended secondary school and in 1992 becoming a Sorbian grammar school. Since then, the primary and middle schools have also been located under the same roof. On the one hand, this guarantees that there is a continual bilingual stream but on the other hand, it also guarantees that new pupils can join the school at any time.

Learning in double lessons

Bright letters hang from the ceiling of the entrance hall. Ten-year-old Jonas jumps up the stairs to the fourth storey of the newly-renovated school building and calls out a resounding "Dobry dźeń!- guten Tag" to his geography teacher Gabriela Jendrewski across his school bag. When the teacher arrives in the classroom with a large pile of Sorbian-German dictionaries shortly afterwards, Jonas has already been sitting in his seat for a while and is looking at the large map of Germany at the front of the room. For year five pupils at the bilingual Sorbian Grammar School, the day begins at 9.15 with a double lesson of geography. They talked about the port of Hamburg last time, and today's class will be about transportation routes. There is nothing particularly unusual about that at a German grammar school, apart from the fact that Eva Maria Elle is now standing next to Gabriela Jendrewski, also a geography teacher, and that while Hamburg's port lies on the Elbe, it also lies on the Łobjo, as the river is called in Sorbian.

The school has 360 pupils. Well over half of them are native speakers of Sorbian. They attend classes where most subjects are taught in their language. Those like Jonas, who are learning Sorbian as a foreign or second language, are slowly prepared in the parallel class for the goal of having a fluent command of spoken and written Sorbian in the sixth form. Like the native speakers and pupils who have already attended the bilingual primary school, Jonas has three hours of geography each week. This is because as well as learning the specialist terms in German, the children here also learn the corresponding words in Sorbian and practise pronunciation and spelling. For their part, the native speakers use this additional class time to practise the German language. "The special needs classes give us this additional hour. In year 7, it is taken from Sorbian lessons. That is why we also cooperate closely with the Sorbian teachers," explains Eva Maria Elle.

Keeping an eye on pupils' individual language level

The pupils at the Sorbian Grammar School learn Sorbian for two to four hours each week, some at native speaker level and others as a foreign language. This means that there are fewer hours available for teaching a second foreign language that at other Saxon grammar schools. In spite of this, the pupils have an extra hour. In the higher years, biology, history and music are also taught in Sorbian language modules. "It depends on the pupils' language levels and which mother-tongue teachers are available," explains Eva-Maria Elle.

She believes that this teaching model is significantly more effective than traditional foreign language classes: "The children learn in a playful way on the basis of their interests while at the same time learning the specialist vocabulary from a wide variety of areas. Because they are practising all the time, they soon speak freely and fluently." General cargo, mass cargo, inland sea - in bilingual subject classes, the German specialist terms are very consciously introduced as well. Although class preparation was significantly more time-consuming at first than in classes held exclusively in German, Eva Maria Elle says, "Today, we are a well-rehearsed team and everyone can bring his strengths into the classroom." She herself, unlike her colleague Gabriela Jendrewski, is not a native speaker of Sorbian, but she speaks the language perfectly. In her view, this is ideal for teaching purposes: "It means that we can deal with pupils' learning difficulties from different perspectives," Elle explains.

Fast progress is pre-programmed

Most of the children are still responding in German to class questions asked consecutively by the teachers in the two languages. But that will soon change. This is because the aim is to change over to teaching in Sorbian very soon: "Sometimes, we are surprised ourselves about the speed of progress", says Gabriela Jandrowski, as she hands out bilingual worksheets. At the same time, Eva Maria Elle slowly repeats the task to be completed in Sorbian. There is quiet concentration while the pupils work in small groups to look up German transportation routes in their atlases and then to look up the Sorbian names of important hub cities in their Sorbian-German dictionaries. Jonas and his neighbour Philipp are working enthusiastically. Why are they learning Sorbian? "Because it is important in the region and I enjoy learning a new language," says Philipp.

In their joint class preparation, the two teachers usually resort to German teaching materials from publishers, add Sorbian translations of graphs and formulate whole passages of text in Sorbian. "That's to practise pronunciation," says Elle. "It enables pupils with more prior knowledge to read the passages and to help the others to practise their pronunciation," says Elle, explaining the daily task of bridging the gap between the different language levels still existing within year five. Also, the teachers can resort to German specialist text-books that have been translated into Sorbian, for example the geography book Terra published by Klett publishing house: "The pupils then work with both versions. First, they acquire the knowledge using the German version and then they read the same text again in the Sorbian translation," explains the teacher and claps her hands together: "How are the goods transported from the port in Hamburg to Munich?" There is quiet concentration while the pupils follow their teacher's pointer on the map.

Learning ability and motivation are decisive

Does Jonas' classmate Laura consider herself to be particularly gifted? The eleven-year-old shakes her head: "Sometimes it is quite hard to keep learning new vocabulary. But somehow you get into it." The school's deputy head René Jatzwauk has a similar view. Although in principle every pupil who has been referred to grammar school may attend the Sorbian Grammar School, a will to learn and motivation are also important prerequisites for successful learning in bilingual classes: "The children who are eager to learn and who do not see homework as a chore have no problems," he observes.

He only rarely has to dispel the concerns of non-Sorbian parents who fear that their child could be overstretched in a school where many children have a Sorbian background. In fact, attending the grammar school is enjoying growing popularity among German pupils: "For most parents, it is a conscious decision to give their children more from the region and to offer them the opportunity to hone their ability to learn a new language from when they are very young. Once the system has been made clear, they can learn other languages much more easily."

Inspiring personal goals

But why learn a minority language of all things? Jatzwauk does not pause for thought for long: "The advantages of bilingualism in times of globalisation and the EU's extension to the East are self-evident. A Sorb understands Czech, Polish and the languages of the former Yugoslavia without any great problems," he explains. Thus, school-leavers from the Sorbian Grammar Schools in Bautzen and Cottbus can enrol at Charles University in Prague if they pass the Czech language examination there. Pupils' achievements in the Sorbian language are given special mention on their school-leaving certificates. Learning foreign languages is an important part of learning at the Sorbian Grammar School. As well as English, which is already taught from year three of primary school onwards, the pupils have the opportunity to choose between Czech, Russian and French in year six and to start Latin in year eight. Working groups for Polish and Spanish round off the all-day school's additional offer. The bell rings on time. Jonas packs his vocabulary book. He has learnt a lot today because he has an ambitious aim: "When I go on my summer holiday to the Czech Republic with my parents, I want to understand everything."