Neglectable skills? Translation, linguistic and literary knowledge and the ability to express oneself

Germany, ID CLEaR2015-227

Foreign language teaching no longer aims at providing learners with the ability of in-depth comprehension of foreign language structures and content. Consequently, awareness-based “classical” grammar teaching has been replaced by playful methods and “classical” translation exercises have had to give way to the much more superficial method called  mediation.  That these tendencies do exist is confirmed by empirical research on actual linguistic skills of graduates. Based on those observations, the following questions arise:

Question        1.): What role does translation play

1a.) regarding the internalization of foreign language structures?

1b.) regarding the training of in-depth comprehension of content?

Question 1b.) clearly reveals the hermeneutic dimension on which translation skills have to be grounded so that a link can more or less automatically be established with competences in literary studies, i.e.

Question 2.):

In what way can dealing with literary texts in foreign language classes foster linguistic and communicative skills in general?

Key words: cognition-based teaching