As part of the literature review research for my doctoral study, a phenomenology into reading for pleasure at A Level in German, I conducted an expert interview with Katrin Kohl, Professor for German literature at the University of Oxford.
Her book Modern Languages – why it matters was of great interest and there were some ideas she raised that I felt were relevant to my study. I was also eager to glean the perspective of a modern linguist on the topic of reading for pleasure and second or third language acquisition.
The questions I designed were aimed at exploring her views on the reading for pleasure process, its impact and role in language acquisition as well as meaning-making. The A Level literary curriculum and examples of accessible reading in German for young linguists were other aspects upon which I was equally keen to seek her opinion.
Imagination and meaning-making
I asked Professor Kohl about her views on the effects of reading. She explained that reading activates the imagination and allows us to be transported into eras or worlds that we may never have been to as “there’s nothing visual, no visual inputs to guide what we ‘see’ in our mind’s eye. It’s all coming through the mind really because you’re translating words into something that becomes the world you are experiencing through the eyes of the characters.”
We then explored the importance of language and meaning. She expounded that it is not so much that the meaning resides in the language, but that the language acts as the means of structuring what you conceptualise. She gave the example of time, which is conceptualised and expressed differently in different languages, thus prompting you to think differently about it. For example, an experiment in psychology discovered that speakers of Mandarin tend to use more vertical metaphors when talking about time than speakers of English, and that this corresponds to a greater tendency to conceptualise time in vertical terms. For her, this meant that learning a language gives you an insight into different ways of thinking “encouraged by the language and one can then explore further, and find out how this manifests itself in literature.”
Reading for pleasure and teaching literature in another language
The conversation progressed onto the topic of reading for pleasure in another language. She elaborated that “if you are learning another language which is not your native medium, you are already stepping out of your ordinary world and going beyond boundaries, so the unlocking of a door into another world is something that is already happening.” She expanded that “you experience it most effectively if you then read in that language, read about a world the language belongs to.”
She acknowledged that not having to expend effort on reading meant that the reader can “enjoy imbibing what it is that comes into our heads through that process.” However, she pointed out that the pleasure can also come from different aspects, for example, “puzzling things out, or doing it in a group, or perhaps through translation […] or reading parallel texts.” We then reviewed the current A Level prescribed texts lists in England and moved on to talk about complex multi-facetted, yet linguistically accessible, book recommendations she had for adolescent readers in German.
Moral imagination and cultural insight
When I probed further about the deeper impact of reading, she reflected that this can “differ culturally”, with reference to fairy tales which were used in the 19th century in Germany “as a means of training moral attitudes and the difference between right and wrong.” She identified that literature does still fulfil that role to a considerable extent because “it enables us to empathise with some characters more than others and we develop a sense of what is good and what is bad. And that might be more, or less, obvious and more, or less, complex.” She pondered that “the older we get, the more we’re able to negotiate the complexity and that becomes then something that’s very useful for teaching, in so far as, a group can discuss the complexities, the different characters, what they contribute, what has led to their downfall or their success and so on.”
She also highlighted the role of the imagination in activating the creation of worlds that one has never been to: “I think foreign language teaching […] when one is teaching about eras in the past, enables us to imagine what it means to live in that age […] in that sense, that can be a way of discussing what that era was like and what the pressures were […] also giving quite a deep insight into another culture, into another world, into another way of living.”
Meeting Katrin, preparing for, conducting and transcribing the interview was a throughly enjoyable experience. As a doctoral candidate, I would recommend reaching out to experts in your fields of interest as part of the process of reading for your literature review if you can. It certainly turned out for me to be an incredibly useful sounding board for foundational ideas for the study. Particularly as there was little in the way of existing UK based literature that brought together the topics of reading for pleasure, German language acquisition and the development of moral imagination in particular.
The Oxford German Network, run by the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, linking schools, universities, organisations and companies interested in German-speaking countries, has also kindly agreed to be a gatekeeper for the study and will help to disseminate the research flyer amongst pupils and teachers in its network.
By Cathy Shail