Language Fieldwork: A Pedagogical Tool for German Conversation and Composition Courses

Fieldwork as an academic activity is hardly a recent development or dramatic breakthrough in higher education. For years, students have done to gain practical experience through firsthand observation, and scholars as well as students have gathered anthropological, sociological, and linguistic evidence by interviewing subjects in the field. Linguistic fieldwork, for example, has been an important initial step for most research in descriptive linguistics during the last century and certainly is an integral part of much of the sociolinguistic and ethnolinguistic research occurring today. The primary tools of linguistic are a good-quality tape recorder and a questionnaire. In order to obtain the desired results, it is necessary to ask appropriate questions, and it is especially helpful if the informants' responses are recorded on tape for playback, transcription, and analysis at a later time. Fieldwork experience as an adjunct activity in foreign instruction is a relatively recent application of an instructional method used in other disciplines. Formal instruction has traditionally been closely tied to the classroom and the laboratory. Little attention has been directed to another resource for foreign learning, namely, the recent immigrant, exchange student, or visitor to the community who speaks the students are learning. While educators generally agree that these persons are valuable resources for practice and cultural information, they have not been extensively integrated into foreign instruction. The purpose of this article is to discuss language fieldwork as an adjunct activity in German conversation and composition courses and as one means of encouraging contacts between students and native speakers of German. What follows is a brief discussion of concurrent developments in foreign education which support the use of fieldwork, a short history and description of my personal experience with such an activity, as well as an evaluation of the project and conclusions based on the evaluation.