The role of nativeness in early modern foreign language learning: evidence from teaching materials
-
André Kött
and
Ulrike Vogl
Abstract
In this article, we explore how the “ideal student” and “the ideal teacher” of a modern foreign language were depicted in 16th and 17th-century textbooks of the genre of so-called “dialogue books”. More specifically we assess in which areas language expertise was expected from students and teachers and how nativeness, i.e., being a native speaker, was construed as an element of this general expertise. Our insights are based on the structure and content of the textbooks. Moreover, we analyse introductory texts, written by textbook authors or printers. The teaching material reveals a strong focus on spoken language as it consists of dialogues inspired by daily life and pronunciation guides that use a contrastive approach. Overall, our analysis suggests that the “ideal student” has to learn to speak a foreign language, thereby striving for a correct pronunciation and to communicate in a polite and pragmatically adequate way. The “ideal teacher” is a native speaker who has the authority to teach his mother tongue and to judge the teaching of others. However, the superiority of nativeness pales beside other required qualifications, i.e., learnedness, didactic skills and expertise in the language one teaches.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Out of the mouths of babes: children and the formation of the Río de la Plata Spanish address system
- The role of nativeness in early modern foreign language learning: evidence from teaching materials
- ‘The seas was like mountains’: intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters
- Locating the ‘Age of Prescriptivism’ in Late Modern periodical reviews: a corpus-assisted discourse analytic approach
- Language maintenance and shift in a Swiss community on the Black Sea
- Book Reviews
- Ivor Timmis: The discourse of desperation: late 18th and early 19th century letters by Paupers, Prisoners, and Rogues
- Kai Witzlack-Makarevich: Sprachpurismus im Polnischen. Ausrichtung, Diskurs, Metaphorik, Motive und Verlauf. Von den Teilungen Polens bis zur Gegenwart
- Olga Timofeeva: Sociolinguistic variation in Old English: Records of communities of people (Advances in historical sociolinguistics 13)
- Anna D. Havinga & Bettina Lindner-Bornemann: Deutscher Sprachgebrauch im 18. Jahrhundert: Sprachmentalität, Sprachwirklichkeit, Sprachreichtum (Germanistische Bibliothek 71)
- Megumi Sato: Sprachvariation und Sprachwandel im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur Kasusrektion der Präpositionen wegen, statt, während und trotz
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Out of the mouths of babes: children and the formation of the Río de la Plata Spanish address system
- The role of nativeness in early modern foreign language learning: evidence from teaching materials
- ‘The seas was like mountains’: intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters
- Locating the ‘Age of Prescriptivism’ in Late Modern periodical reviews: a corpus-assisted discourse analytic approach
- Language maintenance and shift in a Swiss community on the Black Sea
- Book Reviews
- Ivor Timmis: The discourse of desperation: late 18th and early 19th century letters by Paupers, Prisoners, and Rogues
- Kai Witzlack-Makarevich: Sprachpurismus im Polnischen. Ausrichtung, Diskurs, Metaphorik, Motive und Verlauf. Von den Teilungen Polens bis zur Gegenwart
- Olga Timofeeva: Sociolinguistic variation in Old English: Records of communities of people (Advances in historical sociolinguistics 13)
- Anna D. Havinga & Bettina Lindner-Bornemann: Deutscher Sprachgebrauch im 18. Jahrhundert: Sprachmentalität, Sprachwirklichkeit, Sprachreichtum (Germanistische Bibliothek 71)
- Megumi Sato: Sprachvariation und Sprachwandel im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur Kasusrektion der Präpositionen wegen, statt, während und trotz
