One of the striking features of the first Waldorf School is that all pupils from Class 1 upwards were taught two foreign languages. Prior to its founding in 1919, teaching foreign languages in German schools began in Class 5 and was the privilege of children belonging to middle and upper class families.
What reasons did Rudolf Steiner give for introducing foreign languages to all children at this early age?
These were certainly very different from the pragmatic reasons for teaching and learning foreign languages that have become increasingly important in society throughout the decades since then.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF EDUCATION
To begin with, Steiner emphasized that anything children are taught at school should be based on genuine anthropology.
In other words, a true understanding of the developing human being and his inherent talents should be at the heart of all teaching and education.
In Freie Schule und Dreigliederung, Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage, 1915-1921:
“The Waldorf School is not a reform school like many others, which are founded because people think they know where the mistakes of this or that kind of education and teaching lie.
It has arisen from the thought that the best principles and the best will in this area can only become effective when the educator and teacher is a true expert of the human being.
We should not ask: What do we need to know for the social order that exists, but what is in our disposition, and what can be developed in us?
Then it will be possible to bring new forces into the social order from the growing generation. Then, in this order, life will always be what the fully-human beings entering it will make of it.”
FOREIGN LanguageS FROM THE START
In April 1919, during the first discussions about the possibility of establishing a school for the children of the workers of the Waldorf Astoria factory, Steiner already stressed the great importance of “taking up foreign language teaching from the lowest school level,” as Herbert Hahn recalls in his autobiography Der Weg, der mich führte; Lebenserinnerungen (Stuttgart 1969)
It was important for children to “grow into the other language purely through imitation and in full development of their child-appropriate linguistic capability” before even thinking of having a foreign-language book in their hands.
And this should happen at an age when they still had sculpturally malleable organs, receptive to the differentness of other languages.
WHY LEARN Foreign LanguageS?
In contrast to pragmatic reasons for teaching foreign languages, Steiner’s focus was fundamentally on pedagogical aspects:
The encounter with other languages should not only serve to extend the individual’s horizon in a formal manner. It should also enrich and diversify his inner life, nurturing his very soul.
It should be understood that “the different languages of the world influence human beings in completely different ways and reveal different human aspects.”
We become more universal when we learn other languages. The child should get to know the objects in his environment anew in the foreign language.
It is vital, Steiner maintained, to introduce languages other than one’s own as a means of balancing whatever one-sided influence any particular language exerted on the developing child.
By getting to name and recognize objects in the world around him in a new way through the medium of a foreign language, every child would be given the opportunity to break free from the confines of his mother tongue.
Language Teaching IN CONTEXT
Education of this kind is intended to help prevent children from growing into narrow-minded and nationalistically prejudiced adults.
In view of the ever-increasing nationalist tendencies in the present-day world, it appears peculiarly relevant that Rudolf Steiner wrote this in 1922.
He stated that it was one of the most urgent tasks of the present that, in view of a tendency towards the separation of nations on the basis of their languages, a striving for tolerance and mutual understanding should consciously be promoted.
The fact that different languages in our world shape the inner life and viewpoints of their speakers in their own ways – revealing unique and widely varying aspects of human nature – must be taken into account in education.
This view coincides with the idea of the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt that inherent within every single language lies a distinct and characteristic way of looking at the world:
“The whole manner in which objects are subjectively perceived inevitably forms the structures and usage of language (…) The individual word is created by this perception. It is not an imprint of the object itself, but of the picture it creates in the soul.”
MORE THAN COMMUNICATION
This concept of language – within the context of teaching foreign languages early – has been gaining ground in recent decades.
For instance in the work of the Russian psycholinguist Alexei Alexandrovich Leontiev, who repeatedly emphasized the importance of learning a foreign language not merely in order to acquire a new communicative tool, but rather as a means of opening up a new world and encountering a new culture.
It is interesting to note that, a hundred years after the introduction of teaching foreign languages in the first Waldorf School, the renowned German Goethe Institute should, at long last, arrive at the following positive attitude towards early foreign language learning:
“The particularly favourable learning conditions for young children in terms of language acquisition continue to be the main argument for foreign language teaching even in kindergarten and primary school.
Young children build up networks in the brain more quickly, which makes learning easier. Through the use of movement and games, for example, phonetics can be learned and consolidated in a mother-tongue-like way.
Early language learning seems to have a beneficial effect on learning in general through the development of children’s own learning strategies.
Early foreign language teaching can use the child’s age-appropriate psychological characteristics such as curiosity, need for communication as well as willingness and ability to imitate. Instruction offers the child an opportunity to develop in a variety of ways and promotes a positive attitude towards foreign languages.”
See also Goethe Institut, Frühes Fremdsprachenlernen: Grundschule
Cognition – Memory – Learning
From time to time, worried parents tell the teachers that their child does not understand what is being taught in the foreign language classroom.
To begin with, as language teachers we are well advised to give the parents a ‘taster’ of how we teach languages in Waldorf education. It is best done before the children in Class 1 have their first language lesson.
This way parents get a chance to experience how much our approach differs from the way they were taught foreign languages, probably in a mainstream school.
If this session is spiced with some ‘juicy’ practical examples, the parents will be well prepared for what and how their children will be introduced to the foreign language.
TOLERATING AMBIGUITY
It will also be helpful to point out that our teaching is based on two elements:
On the one hand, we work with every-day language that has to do with concrete things – e.g. parts of the body, objects in the classroom, colours etc. – which no child can possibly fail to understand because it is holistic, involving among others the sense of sight and touch.
According to Stephen Krashen, this is comprehensible input.
Note: “The American linguist, educational researcher and activist Krashen’s language acquisition theories can be summarized as: Learners acquire language when exposed to comprehensible input, i.e. language that is a step beyond their current level of language proficiency. (…) According to Krashen, error correction and explicit teaching of rules are not important in language acquisition. Rather, students learn best when they are focusing on the purpose of communicating, not the form of the language.” Source: Free PDF
On the other hand, there is a wealth of poetic language that becomes accessible only gradually, mainly when we succeed in engaging the children’s feelings.
This depends largely on the mood we manage to create and the appropriate gestures we offer the children.
The process of ‘understanding’ a poem can sometimes take weeks or months, but at this stage of the children’s development we are not concerned with a word-by-word understanding.
It is also worth pointing out to parents that one of the criteria of a good language-learner is that she has a certain tolerance of ambiguity (in other words: tolerance of incomprehension), which means she is prepared to learn things ‘on trust’, i.e. without knowing the exact meaning of what is being learned.
A child in the lower classes that is constantly concerned with the ‘meaning’ of what is being taught will block her own learning process.
STUDIES AND INSIGHTS
In 1907, a German academic couple, Clara and Wilhelm Stern, published a detailed scientific study of the way their children acquired their mother tongue. (Die Kindersprache: eine psychologische und sprachtheoretische Untersuchung; Barth, Leipzig 1907)
Note: Stern, having formulated the IQ test for which he is most remembered, cautioned against the use of this formula to determine intelligence. “He believed individual differences such as intelligence are very complex in nature, and there is no easy way to qualitatively compare individuals to each other.” (Wikipedia)
One of the main conclusions of their thorough research was the need for a superabundance of language:
“The child is offered far more linguistically at every age group than it can fully apprehend and reproduce.
This is (…) not only not a disadvantage, but a necessity; for the child’s attention only encompasses a section of what is offered, often small and not measurable beforehand, and the respective stage of development is decisive for an unenforceable selection from the abundance of impressions: the child must have water in order to be able to swim.”
Sixty years later, the findings of the Sterns were emphatically confirmed by Hildegard Hetzer:
“The understanding of what others speak generally goes further than what children are able to use in their own speaking.
The range of passive vocabulary, i.e. the number of words whose meaning is understood when heard, is far greater than that of active vocabulary, i.e. the number of words that the child uses.
The same applies to the understanding and active use of different types of words, the construction of sentence forms, etc.
The language offered to the child must be above the level of what he or she is able to understand and speak, if it is to be promoted from a linguistic point of view.”
From the point of view of teaching foreign languages, Ursula Karbe emphasizes the principle of offering the children a superabundance of language.
In a list of aspects to be considered in the design of didactic methods for foreign language learning, she cites first and foremost as an essential principle “the appropriate organization of a linguistic surplus (offering a variety of foreign language impulses) as input.”
According to Manfred Pelz, a German author of books on language-learning:
“There is a layer of language grasping that goes beyond the logical-conscious, that has something to do with language magic that clearly borders on the mythical of children’s reality.”
The Canadian educationist Kieran Egan points to the close relationship between feeling and memory:
“The human memory is an ever-active, emotionally charged (…) faculty, whose separation from ‘reason’ or, indeed, ‘emotion’ makes only limited sense for limited purposes.
If our concern is for young children learning the bases of their cultural lives, then our concern with emotion and the active ‘poetic’ memory is more appropriate than a concern with lodging discrete information and skills for later recall.”
In an educational lecture in 1921, Rudolf Steiner said:
“When we look at what remains of the imagination which reappears as memory, the sum of the processes that then lead to what is remembered is actually present in the same soul region in which the emotional life is present.
The emotional life with its joy, its pain, its pleasure and displeasure, its tension and relaxation and so on – this emotional life is actually the bearer of the permanent part of the ideas, and from it recollection is then taken.
Our ideas are transformed into emotions, and it is these emotions that we perceive and that lead to memory.”
Already in a lecture a few months before the founding of the first Waldorf School, Steiner had mentioned how “intimately related” feeling and memory are.
Everything that is to be absorbed by the memory at primary school age has an effect on the feeling.
For the child from seven to fourteen, the following applies:
“One should behave with all teaching and all education (…) in such a way that the child unfolds his rhythmic system freely and harmoniously under the impression of our behaviour.”
Steiner also emphasized the emotional aspect when he said, “Language instruction at the earlier stages is developed purely from speaking and feeling, so that the child learns to speak from feeling,” because before the ninth year, “the child has an entirely emotional relationship to language”.
Thus the child gets the opportunity “to learn the language from the element (…) from which it originates: from the emotional element”.
LEARNING THROUGH IMMERSION
In order to nurture memory, the young person must also learn things of which s/he should only later acquire conceptual understanding:
“One even learns best to grasp afterwards in terms of what one has only acquired in this age purely by memorizing (…)
In some ways, all cognitive understanding should be taken up from the stored memory treasure. The more the young person already knows memory-wise before he moves on to the conceptual grasping, the better.”
“It could (…) contribute a great deal to the mastery of the language if the child only learns to understand from memory what it has learned by sound.”
See also Language Teaching in Steiner-Waldorf Schools, Floris Books 2014
Lionel Billows, the grand old man of cooperative language learning, wrote:
“Children are inclined to accept one difficulty or another, or sometimes even something completely incomprehensible, when other attractions such as timbre, rhythm or imagery can compensate for this intellectual confusion.
I myself never particularly asked what expressions like ‘buckle my shoe’ meant or what a ‘tuffet’ was when I sang these songs as a child. I was tempted by their rhythm and sound, so I accepted them on suspicion.”
See also The Techniques of Language Teaching, Longman 1961
Rudolf Steiner regarded memory formation as one of the most important tasks of education between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.
Since insufficient cultivating of the child’s memory could have negative health consequences in adult life, the memory must be “developed according to plan”.
“Only by working on the habitual in the human being can you put his will and thus his power of memory in order.
In other words, you must (…) understand why everything that arouses the child’s intense interest also helps to strengthen his memory (…)
The power of memory must be raised from feeling and will, not by mere intellectual memory exercises.”
On the other hand, Steiner warns just as emphatically against overloading the child’s memory.
As with other pedagogical measures, it is above all the healthy balance between too little challenge and overload that counts, “the right pulse between listening and watching and one’s own work.”
Prof. Dr. Christoph Jaffke (1939) attended the Rudolf Steiner Schule Wuppertal. Having studied in Tübingen, Cologne and Edinburgh, he taught English at Freie Waldorfschule am Kräherwald in Stuttgart from 1967 to 2000 and has been training English teachers at Freie Hochschule Stuttgart, Seminar für Waldorfpädagogik, since 1975.
In 1976, he founded the series Materials for Foreign Language Teaching at Rudolf Steiner /Waldorf Schools.
As one of the most experienced English teachers in the Waldorf movement, he organized the annual in-service-training in Stuttgart for Waldorf foreign language teachers from 1987 to 2017.
His doctoral dissertation (Augsburg University 1994) dealt with teaching foreign languages in Waldorf grades 1 to 4 as the first scientific presentation of this subject.
In 1997, he was one of the co-founders of the Waldorf English Week in Germany, an in-service-training with many artistic features. It has taken place continuously (except for two years during the pandemic) and is attended by teachers from all over Europe, from Asia and South America.
Jaffke was a visiting professor at Hiroshima University in 2005, and at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo in the first part of 2006.
Contact: info@christophjaffke.net
