About This Book

Fremdsprache Deutsch unterrichten belongs to the professional literature of DaF — Deutsch als Fremdsprache, German as a foreign language — and its subject is the craft itself. A methodology book does not teach German; it teaches teaching: the theory and practice of how languages are learned and how lessons can be built to serve that learning. Its chapters concern the teacher’s invisible work — planning, presenting, practising, correcting — the decisions made before and during the forty-five minutes the class can see.Such books matter because teaching quality is the largest single variable in a learner’s progress, larger than any coursebook. A shelf of learner materials, like this library, rests on the assumption that someone knows how to use them well; this volume is about that someone.

What Learners Will Practise

Planning Lessons That Teach

Teachers working with this book practise the architecture of the lesson: the sequence that moves a class from meeting a structure to using it, the pacing that respects attention, the staging that lets every learner speak. Planning is practised as a discipline of intentions — what will they be able to do at the end that they could not do at the start? — against which every activity must justify itself.

Correcting Without Silencing

Error correction is the teacher’s most delicate instrument, and it is practised here as judgement: which errors to treat now, which to note for later, which to let pass in the interest of courage. The teacher who corrects everything teaches silence; the one who corrects nothing teaches mistakes. Methodology exists to find the professional middle, learner by learner and moment by moment.

Seeing the Classroom as Learners See It

The deepest practice the book offers is perspective: the teacher rehearsing the learner’s experience of the lesson — where it confuses, where it bores, where it suddenly illuminates. Methods and techniques are finally instruments of empathy with a syllabus attached, and the teachers who improve fastest are those who keep re-entering their own classroom through the students’ door.

Key Features

Its professional address is the feature: a book for teachers in a library of books for learners, treating didactics and methodology as the serious disciplines they are. Its second feature is range of reader — trainee and veteran alike work with methodology, at different depths. In this collection it is the keystone volume for anyone who teaches from these shelves.

Who This Book Is For

Teachers of German as a foreign language are its readers: trainees in formation, school and institute teachers, private tutors, and the native speakers who discover that teaching their language is a profession to be learned rather than a talent to be assumed. Teacher-trainers and course directors will also use it, as the shared reference that gives a staff room a common professional language.

How to Use This Book

Read it against your own timetable: a section before the week it concerns, applied in the next lessons while it is fresh, judged by what the class does differently. Keep notes in its margins from real lessons — the example that failed, the activity that flew — until your copy becomes the record of your own formation. And reread it in a year: methodology books change as their readers do, and the chapter that seemed theoretical will have become the one about last Tuesday.

Related Books

For classroom vocabulary training at B1, see Deutsch Intensiv Wortschatz B1 Das Training, and for grammar practice across A1 to B1, Grammatik Aktiv A1 B1 Uben Horen Sprechen.