5 - Ritual in the instruction and inversion of German

Summary

In the last chapter, I looked at the ways in which (mainly male) students in Class 9A improvised Deutsch in corridors, Maths, English and Humanities lessons, and I identified two potential sources for this – the representation of Germans in British popular culture, and the German lessons that they were attending for 45 minutes three times a week. There is no reason why these two influences should be mutually exclusive, but the boys themselves stressed the foreign language classes as their main source, and with several guts, dankes and Entschuldigungs, and no Achtungs, Fritz or Donner und Blitzens, the words they used seemed more rooted in elementary textbooks than, say, comics. But so far, I have said very little about these German lessons. What were they like? How did youngsters respond to them? In what ways could they actually be linked to the improvisations in Deutsch?

In the first part of this chapter, I provide a description of these foreign language lessons (Chapter 5.1), and I suggest a little later that the students didn't enjoy them very much, making it all quite hard work for the German teachers (Chapter 5.3). These lessons were highly ritualised (Chapter 5.2), and although as institutional rituals, the lessons were much more elaborate than the interaction rituals in which students improvised Deutsch outside the German class, both kinds of ritual were embedded in competition for support and influence (Chapter 5.4).