Error correction 2

J and I were just trying to recall by memory the words for the German folksong "Hänsel und Gretel." I started singing: Hänsel und Gretel / verlaufen sich im Wald. J interrupts and says "Nein, Papa, es ist verliefen. Sie verliefen sich im Wald." I told him he was absolutely right. 

Now it is true that some versions of the song do have verliefen sich. But I checked, and the one we have always listened to, as well as done close readings of and artwork on together ...

March 2014

March 2014

... has a different verb, verirrten sich. 

It's possible that J heard another version somewhere along the way. But I suspect he (following me) just substituted sich verlaufen for sich verirren because—I think—we use the former more than the latter in daily conversation (on our walks for example). So what the correction really tells me, I think, is not only that J has synonyms at his command, but that he is capable of abstractly generalizing the preterite over the different rule systems of both regular and irregular verbs. 

Oh, and later when I said "Kanguru," J corrected me to "Känguru."

Media today 32

Listening: Roald Dahl, Sophiechen und der Riese, 3:13-3:41 (end); Grimms, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, KHM 5, "Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geißlein" (7:41 min.); Albert E. erklärt unsere Sonne, 11:30-21:50.

Viewing: Die Sendung mit der Maus, "Sonnenfinsternis" (8:29); Live reportage from the 1999 eclipse in Germany (9:54); "Erde und Mond: Ein Doppelspiel im All" (10:34)

I must say, "Pupsräuber" as BFG-speak for "Hubschrauber" (English: "bellypoppers" < "helicopters") is pretty good and hits J right in his scatalogical sweet spot.

We've read, listened to, and seen the Grimm tale many times already. By now J finds it kind of boring. 

Age 5.1.19

Literary-critical Sunday school, part 5

Reading: The Beginner's Bible, 370-396. 

Listening: Margot Käßmann, Die Bibel für Kinder, 17:30-21:41; Grimm brothers, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Nr. 4, "Märchen von einem der auszog, um das fürchten zu lernen" (23 min.); Roald Dahl, Sophiechen und der Riese, 2:24-2:53.

I asked J this morning if he wanted to read or listen to the story of Cain and Abel. He said no and became very upset, so we didn't. I'm not sure why he reacted so strongly. I asked him if he's heard the story at school (he goes to an Episcopal day school with weekly religious lessons) or at church with his grandmother. He said no, that he's just read the story the one time with me (over a year ago now). I remember we read (more like quickly scanned) the version in Annemarie Benedikt, Die Kinderbibel. It has a pretty gripping picture of the fratricide that may be the main case of the negative impression:

The reason Cain's offering is rejected by God is not easy to explain to a child. Famously, the bible itself says nothing about a difference in the brothers' motives: In the course of time Cain brought to the lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions (Genesis 4: 3-4). Both Benedikt and our other German children's bible, by Eckart zur Neiden, rationalize God's rejection of Cain's offering by the traditional move of imputing selfish motives to the latter, which God perceives. Käßmann has an interesting way of dealing with this: her Cain has the impression that God favors Abel's over his offering, and becomes jealous. 

The famous Golden Children's Bible, which was my only bible as a child, imputes just the barest hint of greater thankfulness to Abel: One day it came to pass that Cain brought some of his harvest as an offering to the lord, while Abel brought the fattest and choicest of his lambs. I remember very clearly reading that passage and really struggling to understand why exactly God rejected Cain here, and I think that interpretive challenge was and is a good thing. The psychologizing takes an easy way out, and does some injustice to the complexity of Cain as a figure. 

When I asked J what he thought of Jesus's parables about the good Samaritan and the good shepherd, he said: "Daddy, do you know what I noticed? The animals are all smiling in the book!" Lo and behold:

When I asked him what he thought about it he said it was probably right in the case of the sheep, since he was lost and now found, but he wasn't sure about the donkey, since donkeys have to carry a lot of weight and sometimes their owners don't treat them very well, like the miller in the Musicians of Bremen. 

J really enjoyed the Grimm tale "Märchen von einem der auszog, um das fürchten zu lernen" (English description here) this—our second—time. He himself has been having a lot of bad dreams, so the idea of an absolutely fearless boy who cheerfully disposes of horrifying creatures and situations is very appealing to him. He also enjoys the "stupid boy" topos, being himself in a phase where he's calling everything stupid. 

I took the opportunity of working on the important idiom jemanden für etwas halten = "to consider somebody to be something." I said: Die Leute halten den Jungen für dumm, aber er ist es nicht, er ist nur ganz jung und unerfahren und vielleicht ein bisschen einfältig. ("People think the boy is stupid, but he isn't; he's just young and inexperienced and maybe a little simple-minded"). 

J's favorite episode today was in the cursed castle when the "half a man" comes tumbling down the chimney, followed by the other half. When I asked whether it was the upper half and the lower, or the left half and the right, J said that it could also be the front half and the back (die vorne [sic] Hälfte und die hintere), which I thought was quite clever. 

Age 5.1.12

Do NOT Read This Post! Overinterpreting the Grimms' "Marienkind"

Today my son and I listened to the Grimm brothers fairy tale "Marienkind" (Kinder- und Hausmärchen, no. 3, 13 min.).* 

This is a very strange and disturbing story (par for the course with the Grimms, I suppose) that in some ways represents old-world Catholicism at its darkest: obey unquestioningly, or be not merely expelled from paradise, but burned at the stake! At the same time, the ending is a powerful statement on the total efficacy of the human will in accessing divine saving grace. It's popular Pelagianism. Though of course, the human excercises the will only in the face of the direst threat of violence, which scenario snatches back with the right hand the freedom extended with the left.

Whenever Mary asked the girl if she wants to admit opening the forbidden door, my son called out "Flunkerei!" ("That's a fib!"). Personally, I found there was something almost heroic in the little girl's resoluteness and told J so. Besides, much like with the forbidden fruit, there's the question of why Mary flaunted the door's forbiddenness if she didn't want it opened. 

There is a brilliant scene in Otfried Preußler's Räuber Hotzenplotz that can be read as a parodie of the forbidden door in "Marienkind." Kasperl, trapped in the castle of the evil magician Petrosilius Zwackelmann, finds a door with a sign on it saying "Admittance Strictly Forbidden!"

He goes through, only to find a second door with a sign saying "Very Strictly Forbidden!" 

and then a third door saying "Absolutely Forbidden!"

It's one of J's favorite scenes; we've read and heard it dozens of times. 

One of many things I love about Preußler is the way he subverts traditional fairy-tale motifs, often in a way that represents the empowerment of young subjects vis-a-vis some kind of authoritarianism. The parade example of this is Die kleine Hexe.   

Of course, all this freethinking education is probably going to come back to haunt my wife & me in about ten years—if not sooner!

J asked why the girl (das Mädchen) is always referred to as ihm (dative case), so he's really starting to hear the antiquatedness of the language.  

Age 5.1.7

*We skipped over no. 2 "Katz und Maus in Gesellschaft" at J's request. He has no problem with people being burned at the stake, but can't handle a cat eating a mouse! 

Media today 23

Reading: Max Kruse, Urmel aus dem Eis, ch. 5-6.

Listening: Grimm brothers, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Nr. 1, "Der Froschkönig" (10 min.); Albert E. erklärt Kroko & Co., 46:00-52:00 (end); Albert E. erklärt unsere Sonne, 0:00-11:30. We also had this collection of German Christmas songs playing while I worked and J drew.

Viewing: Let's play Kung Fu Panda (Deutsch), no. 11 (20 min.)

This is a video recording of two German young people playing the German version of the KFP video game and recording their chat while doing so. It may seem like a strange resource, but these videos (and there are now a lot of them) are fantastic for L2 development for several reasons. First, the game itself features a lot of spoken text. 

Second, and more importantly, the players talk up a storm, using colloquial language and a wide range of speech patterns in ways impossible to get from audiobooks and movies. They talk fast, fun & slangy; they slur, shout, mumble, whisper, goof off & joke, argue, etc. Occasionally there is mild obscenity ("Scheiße!"), but nothing too bad, and quite frankly, besides naughty language being a natural part of an authentic speech environment, if picking some up provides J with even a modicum of extra titillation directed at the L2, I'm on board. Not that I ever signal anything but stern disapproval—I know my role! 

J loves these videos and would watch them all day if I let him. 

As for the Frog King, J has never had much to say about it and doesn't like it much. Not that I blame him. The way that the princess manages to lift the curse and be rewarded with true love and happiness not by overcoming her disgust with the froggy prince, as one would hope, but by giving into her revulsion and trying to kill him, is very strange. Not to mention the way a completely different story (Iron Heinrich) hijacks the end. 

When we came to the section where the iron bands around Iron Heinrich's heart break, J said laconically: "Das ist unmöglich" (That's impossible).

Age 5.1.5

Media today 15

Roald Dahl, Sophiechen und der Riese, 1:51-1:56. 

A nice touch is that where the English original refers to "Jack the giant-killer," the German version refers to the Grimm tale "Das tapfere Schneiderlein" ("The Brave Little Tailor") and works in the catchphrase Sieben auf einen Streich. 

The Brave Little Tailor by Alexander Zick

I read this story to J a year or so ago and he seemed to dimly recall it. 

Media today 13

Reading: Brandon Justiz, Monster und mythische Kreaturen: Altes Griechenland. 

This is a great little read (and cheap!), designed for tablet, with delightful quirky pictures and nice short physical descriptions of the monsters. Excellent practice of the dative and genitive case, including with weak nouns, for example Der Greif hat den Körper eines Löwen und Flügel und Gesicht eines Adlers.

When J noticed one evening that some of the snakes have different expressions, I asked him how he thought each of them was feeling about being in Medusa's head helping turn folks to stone. We proceeded to ask them, one by one, and they gave various answers, most infamous of course, but a few conscience-stricken. Now we go through this each time and J does most of the voices. So it's not such a short read anymore!


Listening: Otfried Preußler, Der kleine Wassermann (1:02-1:06); Brothers Grimm, "Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten." See my other post on this today.

Viewing: Die furchtlosen Vier (c. 0:00-60:00)

Age 4.12.19

The Musicians of Bremen, or, the Donkey as Pedagogue

As I write this, J is getting a morning fix of Die furchtlosen Vier, a 1997 remake of the well-known Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten" ("The Musicians of Bremen") about the abused animals who band together against the exploitative world of humans. 

This story was the first fairy tale J experienced first in German, and it has remained very close to his heart (and therefore mine) ever since. In addition to the Grimm tale, he has had read and has heard, seen, retold and played numerous versions.*

It was also in connection with this story that I first began working on one of my fundamental concerns, which is to make J aware of the extent to which all narrative is constructed, contingent, and subject to revision and variation, and also to get him to think and talk about the effect different versions of the same story have on him and why. 

I have done this most consistently with fairy tales and bible stories, two groups of narrative for which a large number of versions are available for children in all forms of media. The ultimate goal is both to school the aesthetic sensibility and to develop skills for dealing critically with any and all narratives and narrative traditions that purport to be authoritative, fixed, authentic, originary, and in whatever way not to be questioned. The bible and fairy tales are also prime examples of such traditions (fairy tales less so today, but once upon a time, in the age of romantic nationalism ...). 

Here are the kinds of questions I first began ask (first modeling with the puppets) during each new version:

• Have you noticed how in this version there is this or that new thing or new character/scene, or that this or that character/scene is missing? 
• Have you noticed how this version is set in this new place? 
• You know what I noticed? In the last version the character did this one thing, but in this version he does this other thing. That's interesting!
• You know what I noticed? In in this version this character is nicer/meaner/funnier/sadder etc. than in the other versions.
• You know what I noticed? This version ends this new way. I like/don't like this ending because ...., but I like/don't like that other ending because ... 

After a certain point J began to ask these same sorts of questions himself, and he does so all the time now. 

The story of the Bremen musicians is also critical in spirit and works on two levels: on a literal level it is about the exploitation of animals by humans, and on the allegorical level about the exploitation of workers by profit-seekers. The strangely ambiguous ending (do the animals actually succeed, or do they fail?) is, in my view and experience, a salutary yet gentle provocation for a little mind swamped in a culture of facile, shiny-happy narrative closure. 

Here are links to some of Jamie's favorite visual versions of the Bremen musicians:

1959 film (75 min)
1972 Muppet version (English)(50 min) 
1987 anime version (20 min)
Die furchtlosen Vier (1997)(87 min)
2009 film (60 min)
Puppet theater (ARD/Kleine Bühne, 1980s)(30 min)
storybook version with images (8 min)
animated storytime video (8:21 min)
short storytime video with Axel Prahl (4:15 min)

*It was during one of his reenactments that I first overheard J speaking to himself in L2, in late summer 2012 (Age 2.9, after eight months of L2). 

Audiobooks and Hörspiele

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of audiobooks for my son's L2 development. Since I am not a native speaker of the L2 and learned it in an academic context, my own L2 production was initially deficient with regard to the linguistic strata associated with childhood: specific idioms and euphemisms of all kinds, especially for bodily experiences and activities; language of concrete physical description, especially of how simple devices work; onomatopoeic words; animal sounds, etc. 

German children's audiobooks made up for these deficiencies for my son and simultaneously taught me a great deal. Furthermore, audio materials, especially multicharacter Hörspiele, allow for regular exposure to a wide variety of different voice types, regional accents, and modes of oral speech, as well as to imitations of everyday communicative phenomena like mutiple people speaking at the same time, interruptions, voices from a distance, etc. 

  
My son has been listening to audiobooks ever since he began German at age 2.2. For the past two years, between ages 2.8 and 4.11, he has been listening about 90 minutes per week. At the time I am writing this, he has done about 250-300 hours of listening to about 70 audiobooks and Hörspiele in the three years he has been learning German. 

There is a major logistical qualification. I have found only one way to get my son to engage in sustained and concentrated listening: in the car, while strapped into his seat. All those hundreds of hours were logged on the road. In fact, much of this driving was for no other purpose than for listening to audiobooks. 

I avoid busy roads and traffic, either cruising very slowly around local neighborhoods (usually in the very early morning) or else out in the country. Fortunately, we live in a small town within easy reach of hundreds of miles of rural roads. If we lived in or near a big city and had difficulty escaping urban or suburban traffic conditions, I would not undertake the risk of so much unnecessary driving. As it is, I only feel guilty about increasing my carbon footprint. 

Chandler Bridge Road, 7 min. from my house

Weekly listening routine. Once per week we take long drive in the country, listening for 45 minutes to an hour. On two other weekdays, we get in 10-20 minutes of listening before I drop Jamie off at school or his grandmother's. The weekend is usually good for another chunk of 15-30 minutes. Then there are scattered bits of time here and there in the afternoon as we run errands or whatever. On longer drives or vacation roadtrips, Jamie will sometimes listen for several hours at a time. 

Technology and method. I get all our German audiobooks and Hörspiele from Audible.de, downloading them via the Audible app directly onto an Ipod touch (a smartphone would work just as well), which plugs into an Ipod jack on a cord into the car stereo. While driving slowly in a residential area or on a country road with no traffic, I have my Ipod in my right palm with my thumb hovering over the icon that makes the recording skip back ten seconds. This is because Jamie likes to hear favorite bits over and over again, a desire I encourage and indulge, since repetition is pure language-learning gold. The pause icon is right there too, which we make liberal use of in order to talk about the story as we are listening. 

(Classical guitarist fingernails!)

Repetition and discussion are a fundamental part of the experience, and the technology makes a difference here: skipping back and pausing is not as quick and easy with a CD player as it is with an Ipod. Nor is it as safe, since you need to take your eyes off the road for a split second. With a bit of practice, this is not necessary with an Ipod touch (or a smartphone) using the Audible app. 

Again, let me make safety issues clear: Only on residential streets and backroads do I do the Ipod-in-the-palm thing. If we're listening while running errands in suburban traffic, there are no pauses or playbacks until we are parked somewhere. 

Primary materials. So far I have placed the greatest emphasis on stories I first read out loud to Jamie from books or e-reader. So the audibook is already a repetition. Our listening tracks our reading very closely; usually same or next day, and we listen only as far as we have read. I do this for three main reasons. First, I like to prioritize the written medium and the intimacy of reading out loud together as the primary literary experience. Secondly, I can make sure Jamie already understands everything before the listening begins, from plot points down to important words and phrases. Thirdly, since the audiobook or Hörspiel generally represents a performative enhancement of what I am capable (with great character voices by professional narrators and actors, catchy songs and soundtracks, cool sound effects), Jamie is less interested in reading a book together that we have first experienced as an audiobook.

For the first two years, the listening was dominated by four main groups of stories:

1) Nine Hörspiele based on Hans de Beer's Der kleine Eisbär (from 2.2-3.5 years)

2) Sixteen audiobooks from Ingo Siegner's Der kleine Drache Kokosnuss (from 3.6-4.3 years)

3) Fairy tales by the Grimms (2.5-years-present). 

4) Bible stories (3.10 years-present)

Beginning at age 4.8, the focus has shifted to longer chapter books. We have been working our way through Otfried Preußler's stories (so far Der Räuber Hotzenplotz 1, 2, and 3; Das kleine Gespenst, and Die kleine Hexe) and German audio productions of Roald Dahl's Charlie und die Schokoladenfabrik and Sophiechen und der Riese. In the case of the latter, Jamie first reads the stories with my wife in the original English. 

Other great serials we have dipped into for which great audio productions are avaliable include the Findus und Petterson tales by Sven Nordquist, Max Kruse's Urmel stories, and the endless Benjamin Blümchen Hörspiele. There are dozens more we have not listened to. 

Secondary materials. There is also a massive amount of high-quality German children's non-fiction to be had in audio production. The Random House/cbj audio series "Ich weiß was" is fabulous, covering most areas of basic knowledge in a very entertaining manner. The science and philosophy-oriented Hörspiele by the German astronomer Harald Lesch are truly stellar, managing to broach deep existential and ethical questions in a manner understandable and entertaining for a four-year-old. 

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We usually listen to these sorts of things in shorter snippets, since as not-fiction they do not hold Jamie's attention for very long. We have also listened to a good deal of poetry and mythology. 

Tie-ins to visual media. The more media through which a child can experience a story, the better for language-learning purposes. This factor also partly guides my choice of what we listen to. Of the above materials, many are available as films, television shows, or plays, either free via YouTube or at sites like Kinderkino.de.

In my experience, however, it is best to wait until one has read the book and listened to the audiobook before getting to the visual media. I have found that once J has seen the movie or show, he is less interested in a repeated reading of or listening to the story.  

Beginnings

Below are excerpts from my essay “Piggy Pedagogy: An Adventure with Puppets and Toddler Bilingualism," which will be appearing in the book Raising Children Bilingually in the United States, ed. Iulia Pittman. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015.

Without the help of puppets, bilingualism would have been an experiment I conducted with my toddler and abandoned after a month instead of the endlessly rewarding three-year adventure it has turned into. Originally, I had decided against raising my son—Jamie—bilingually. Although I possess near-native fluency in German (hereafter L2) and have been teaching the language at the college level for 15 years, because I began learning the L2 when I was twenty-one, I felt that I lacked certain important native language and cultural instincts, especially when it came to children and the strata of language associated with childhood. My son was already two years old when, at the prompting of a former student who was raising her children bilingually, I looked into some of the recent literature on the subject, in the course of which I changed my mind.

Of course, I couldn’t simply change languages with my son, who was already fully verbal. Initially, my plan was to use a mixture of English (our L1) and German in a few specific contexts he really cared about and where I was often actively involved in the play (the main ones being his beloved stuffed animal community and Thomas the Train set), then to smoothly and gradually increase the proportion of German in my own discourse. We made what I felt to be good progress in this way for about three or four weeks. Then Jamie seemed to reach a dead end, growing tired of the repetitions and losing interest in learning new words and phrases. Basically, he got tired of German as a game, and saw no need of it as a real medium of communication with me, since he already had one. So I backed off for a few days. When I began again, Jamie declared outright he didn’t want to learn German anymore.

The solution I hit upon was to introduce a hand-puppet who was monolingual in German, thus obligating my child to learn the language in order to communicate with the puppet. It worked immediately and brilliantly. Although the idea came to me independently, it is certainly not original. Puppets have long been widely used in children’s language education at school, and I have since read a number of short descriptions of their use at home in order to reinforce bilingualism. I offer the following account of my experiences and reflections, as well as some of the main techniques, exercises, and scenarios I have found useful, in order that they may help and inspire other parents and language teachers. 

Conditions. Since teaching a second language to a child is a time-intensive and family-impacting enterprise, here is a brief sketch of the professional, material, and domestic conditions that have made it possible for me. An academic schedule, as well as the job security that comes with tenure, has allowed me the luxury of devoting, in addition to significant amounts of time during the summer and holiday breaks, generally one full day during the week of the academic year (mid August to early May) entirely to L2-intensive activities alone with my son. He is an only child, which has made sustained periods of exclusive L2 use much easier than if he had siblings. No less importantly, my wife has been able and willing to adapt to my and Jamie’s gradual shift to the L2 as our main language of communication. Although she herself speaks almost exclusively English with both of us, her German was good enough to allow her to follow all our L2 interactions from the beginning and even to participate in some of the early ones. 

Timeline. Though I have never kept detailed notes on Jamie’s progress in the L2, I have kept track of the main milestones. All in all, it took about eleven months for him to achieve English-German bilinguality. I used active puppetry constantly throughout this whole period, beginning in February 2012, when my son was two years and two months old. For the first six months, the puppet and I, as well as the puppet and Jamie, interacted exclusively in L2. With the puppet on my hand, I spoke as much L2 with Jamie as I could from the very beginning, though always supported by sufficient L1 to serve main understanding. In communicating with me in the presence of the puppet, Jamie spoke mostly L1, though he used single L2 words and phrases from the start. Gradually his L2 use with me increased, but whenever the puppet was not present, he reverted to L1. That began to change at the end of the sixth month (July 2012), when the L2 became our primary medium of communication in the presence of the puppet. (see essay)

The puppets. For the first five months, I used one hand-puppet, the model “Piggy” by the Folkmanis company. 

I chose this particular puppet because it offers excellent simultaneous control of the mouth, face, and two front feet using only one hand. The mouth and face are highly manipulable and make for a very realistic imitation of speaking and facial expressions. At the same time, it is possible to grasp, hold, and manipulate objects (with a little practice, even write and draw) while making the puppet speak. This versatility proved very important, given that I would have these puppets (first one piggy, then two) on my hands pretty much non-stop for the next eleven months during virtually every domestic interaction with my son. I have since added a number of different Folkmanis and other puppets to the mix, but so far none of them offer such easy simultaneous mouth and paw control as does the Folkmanis Piggy. Introducing the puppets. I learned that the puppets could be introduced in a way to create and constantly renew enthusiasm for the L2.... (see essay) 

First phase activities. I used the puppet primarily in three types of scenarios in the beginning 1) ritualized game-routines of narrow scope targeting the progressive inculcation of basic L2 vocabulary, grammar, and syntax; 2) puppet-mediated reading out-loud to Jamie in L1 and L2 simultaneously; and 3) watching L2 television and listening to L2 audiobooks... (see essay)

Puppets and L2 correction. Error correction is a controversial topic among L2 teachers and researchers. In my experience, L2 puppetry can be handled in such a way as to play both sides of the field, as it were... (see essay)

Second phase activities. After six full months, the L2 had become my primary language of communication with my son as long as the puppets (the second piggy, Thusnelda, had joined us by this time, followed since by numerous others) were present. With the exception of social activities involving other people, this was constant—during virtually every domestic routine, every family mealtime, every second evening of bedtime reading, every trip, every car drive, every bike ride, every neighborhood walk, etc... (see essay) 

The puppets after bilinguality. Ever since January 2013, German has been the primary language of communication between me and Jamie. He addresses me in German unless I ask him not to, whines and cries in German when with me, and mumbles German when I’m with him when he wakes up in the middle of the night... (see essay)