J loves musicals. He's been listening to Andrew Loyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat a lot, and knows a lot of the songs by heart. Since this is one of the few American musicals that has been translated and recorded in German, I got it for him.
The libretto is very well translated, by Heinz Rudolf Kunze.
As I've mentioned before (here and here), a significant part of my L2 pedagogy is to have J experience the same stories both in English and in German.
Interestingly, when my wife got home this evening and J was telling her about listening to this in German, he said he understood it better in German than in English! That makes me feel better, and compensates somewhat for this Peter Pan experience.
Ever since he's become interested in World of Warcraft, J has been less active with Minecraft. One consequence is that he's not been watching as many "Let's play" videos, which provide exposure to rapid-paced colloquial language. When he does, he's been mostly choosing English-language ones, which has gotten me worried that it's becoming an effort for him to watch German videos for reasons having to do with L1/L2 divergence.
However, this morning (and in the last couple of days in fact) he chose to watch German videos again:
Later this morning I asked him about comparative understanding. He's generally quite reluctant to answer such questions and doesn't give what I would call rich responses, but he said that he understands the German videos still about as well as the English-language ones. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't; he obviously senses my investment in his German-speaking ability and may be telling me what he thinks I want to hear. Still, it's something. He chose to watch the videos, after all, and had a lot to say about them.
There was a disconcerting incident two days ago, the precise nature and significance of which I've been pondering.
J and I were on one of our audiobook drives in the country, listening to the German version of J.M. Barrie's story Peter Pan, which my wife has been reading in the original to J at bedtime. Suddenly J announced in some distress that he couldn't understand what was going on in the story. He bust into tears and wanted to stop. After a few minutes he calmed down and wanted to resume listening, and thereafter it was business as usual: I could see him paying attention, reacting with facial expressions to what was going on in the story, and seeming to enjoy himself.
Whenever we read/listen to/watch the same story in both languages, I always ask J questions about how well he understands it comparatively. Up until now he has either said that there is no difference in understanding, or that he understands the German version better. This time, when I asked him, he said that he understands the English version of Peter Pan better.
Now on the one hand, I don't dispute that this is simply true, and it seems to me that the incident is more evidence of the L1/L2 divergence that I have been noticing for the past several months and documenting since early March of this year.
On the other hand, I think there are some mitigating circumstances, or differences in the circumstances. First, I've noticed in the past that J's level of concentration is greater while listening to an audiobook in the car than while being read to at home. At home, he tends to be playing with something (stuffed animals, toys, flashlight, etc.) while being read to. Consequently, he tends to drift along over passages he doesn't really comprehend without registering the fact with the reader, or else he simply says he does understand when he doesn't. I noticed this with Unten am Fluss several weeks ago, where it took me quite a while to really see that he wasn't understanding large portions of the story. In the car, however, where he is confined to his car seat and where he (intentionally on my part) doesn't usually have things to play with while listening, he concentrates on the story much more. So it's logical that he would also register non-comprehension in that setting.
Secondly, like Unten am Fluss, Peter Pan is a discursively rather challenging story. My wife has pointed out on numerous occasions that even though it is written for children, in many ways it seems as though an adult audience is being targeted, between the lines so to speak. This is especially the case in ch. 2 (which occasioned the above crisis), where the parents are self-reproachfully recalling the events that led up the the disappearance of the children.
Thirdly, when my wife reads Peter Pan to J, she reads quite slowly. The audiobook narrative is indeed very fast.
Lastly, my wife often pauses in her reading to explain words and references to J. I do this while reading, but not often on our audiobook drives, in order not to fumble with the ipod while driving.
So those are some mitigating factors. Still, I don't doubt that there is some real L1/L2 divergence behind the incident.
Alas. Recently J has started to default more to L1 words when speaking L2, even rather basic ones like "money" for Geld (two instances of this in the last two days). My wife has also said she has started to notice small discrepancies and divergences in his comparative fluency.
All completely inevitable, but still kind of hard for me to take.
In better news: As his reading skills improve, J has been doing a lot more independent looking-reading through books. Usually he spends most of his time with his L1 books. Since he gets pushed in kindergarten with his L1 reading, I deliberately haven't been making him do extra L2 reading to boot after school, since he is after all a child and he needs to have unstructured time. However, he is now starting to spend more time with his German books. When we read together in L2 and I point out words, phrases, and sentences, he usually can read them quite well.
Moving forward, my basic L2 goals with J continue to be:
1) Keep his L2 grammar and syntax healthy and not allow L1 patterns to intrude and fossilize.
2) Keep slowly and steadily building his L2 vocabulary.
3) Maintain his L2 accent.
4) Foster his independent L2 reading, such that he can read close to as easily in L2 as in L1.
