Inter Alia 1
ISBN: 978-
Božo Žibret
Reasons for promoting the German language
Abstract
In Slovene primary school German has been gradually replaced by English although economists argue that it is indispensable to know more foreign languages. German is important for the Slovenes because of the nearness of two German speaking countries, Austria and Germany where German is spoken by about one hundred million people. We have a powerful German car industry (VW, BMW, Mercedes, Audi ...) which uses computer programmes for finding and removing faults in the German language. The importance of German should be presented to the Ministry of Education and to field specialists, on one hand, and to students and employers, on the other hand.
The aim of this article is to show how professional students can be motivated to learn German. Different motivating activities are presented in this article, such as understanding technical texts, solving crossword puzzles containing special terms in German, completing different charts, and matching words. Communication exercises should be also used to raise motivation. Our teaching should include the teaching of special vocabulary used in different professions as well as simple grammatical structures. We should be aware that we educate students for their future jobs and should therefore offer them knowledge that they will be able to use once they get employed.
Keywords: English for specific purposes, German, language teaching, language promotion, car mechanics.
(CC) SALSPT 2008. Inter Alia is licensed under a Creative Commons
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