Abstract:

Luxembourg is one of the few European countries, where three languages are spoken by all the population. Beside the national language, Luxembourgish, German and French are recognized as the two other official languages. On the other side, more than forty percent of the population come from another culture, especially from Portugal or Yugoslavia. A lot of these people only have arrived a few years ago and so they are still not able to speak all the official languages.

In the private life, most of time, Luxembourgish is used to communicate with family and friends, while French is the language of the business and German dominates in the media. This situation explains why all the three languages and English have to be taught at school.

But a lot of the pupils have problems at school, because they are no more motivated to learn another language, especially when it is very different from their language knowledge. During the last years, the situation became more dramatic and a lot of young people got really troubles at school and didn’t manage to finish their classes. At this point, some teachers recognized that it was really time to change the methods and introduced the integral learning at school.

Until then it was very unusual to work with creative methods in the classroom and that is why a lot of people were not convinced by this work. But during the last years, some schools became more progressive and allowed to use the drama pedagogy in the language lessons.

By writing a little play, imaging a new scene or improvising with the others, the pupils discover a new way how to use the language. They learn with all the senses and that helps them to find a new access to the foreign language. By playing a scene, improvising or writing a little text, they really work with their knowledge and become more self-confident, because their stoppages are ebbing. This has also an importance for their normal life, because they learn to speak with the whole body and so they are able to communicate in delicate situations. Otherwise, pupils only learn how to use the grammatical rules or to write a cosy essay. This is also important at school but most of them are not able to practise their knowledge outside the lesson.

A lot of teachers are still not convinced by these integral learning methods and some of them are frightened that it would be to complex to work in this way. In fact, in the beginning the teacher needs time to readjust to the new concept. In the lessons, where he is working with drama pedagogy or theatre games, he has to change his position. On the one hand he is still the teacher who has the responsibility for his pupils but on the other hand, he has to take the part of the director, who motivates the class to be creative. In an open atmosphere, everybody has the possibility to participate and no one can sleep in the stern most corner of the classroom.

The first schools have accepted to integrate theatre playing in the language classes an they have already noticed, that their kids really crammed a lot. Some of them are not so proficient in the German grammatical rules but they are able to use the language, when they need it and they have discovered that culture can be very interesting. Another positive fact is that the University of Luxembourg will do scientific research about these methods to prove how useful they are. So we can be curious, what new changes will come in the following years.