The transdisciplinary dimension and the knowledge of a foreign language in the process of learning German

Abstract

The students who learn German as a second or third foreign language, in general, have at least 4 years of profiency in English or French. Is it enough to directly introduce students into the work on texts in German? What are the particularities of German texts in order to facilitate the access of learning and understanding of the German language? Is it possible to involve specialized topics in the German course? The strategies of understanding a specialized text in German are acquired during a learning process, which is aimed to carefully observe the relation between the text and the image, the title, the subtitle of the paragraphsor the highlighted words in the text; the adjusting between the topic of the subject and the interest of the students. The structure of a text’s content can be done in the native language, but the German keywords will be revealed in order to be retained. The advantage of this approach of language learning is that students become more aware of the musicality and the tonality of the German language by association and analogy with other Germanic languages, such as English. They will develop their ability to analyse and synthese through comprehension exercises on a text, starting from familiar elements to complex questions, by learning to extract the global meaning of the text from the context and by appealing to transversal knowledge. This perspective allows students to develop their vocabulary, facilitates the access to specialized knowledge in the students’ field of interest and ensures a higher motivation in the process of a foreign language learning.