Claire J. Kramsch

Claire J. Kramsch (Licence d'Enseignement, Universite de Paris-Sorbonne) Agregation d'Allemand, Universite de Paris-Sorbonne) has been Professor of German and Foreign Language Acquisition at Berkeley since 1989. Her fields of interest are second language acquisition, applied linguistics, discourse analysis and social and cultural theory. She is also director of the Berkeley Language Center and teaches in the School of Education.

Kramsch explains her attitude about teaching and the classroom in this way: "the real purpose [of lectures and readings] is not the delivery of information, but the creation of an intellectual context in which for fifteen weeks the students and I discover new ways of framing problems and formulating solutions. Classrooms are less places to receive knowledge than opportunities to experience new sensibilities and novel insights which might, in time, lead to knowledge. And I am as much a party to this discovery as my students are."

A graduate student in the Ph.D. program in the School of Education at Stanford reports that the best part of her experience there has been taking courses from Kramsch here. Through the Berkeley-Stanford exchange program, the student was able to enroll in Kramsch's class "Language and Power"; she says it was "by far the most interesting , challenging, and well-taught class I took throughout my Ph.D. experience."

Among her many awards and honors, one in particular stands out. In 1998, the President of Germany awarded her the coveted Goethe Medal of the Goethe Institute for her achievements in promoting intercultural understanding between Germany and the United States. In a letter supporting Kramsch's nomination for the Distinguished Teaching Award, one of her colleagues says that "It would not be an overstatement to say that Claire Kramsch has been the single most influential voice in bringing about productive shifts in the teaching of foreign languages on a national level."

W. Daniel Wilson, Chair of the Department of German says, "Professor Kramsch is not only a phenomenally skilled and well-loved teacher, but her research and administrative activities . . . have palpably contributed to excellence in teaching on the Berkeley campus."

On an end-of-course evaluation, one student, a senior English major, wrote that "The course turned out to be exactly what I expected Cal to be all about. The readings were challenging. . . .Professor Kramsch brought clarity and excitement to her lectures. [The whole experience was] Beautiful. Exciting. Fulfilling."

Statement Of Teaching Philosophy

It is often said that teachers teach the way their teachers taught them and their teachers' teachers taught them. But teachers who emigrate from the intellectual culture of their teachers have to reinvent themselves. What I learned to become a teacher of German language and literature in France, I had to rediscover, when I came to the U.S, to teach German to American students. My field of research, Applied Linguistics, captures the paradox of language learning and language use in various social contexts.

Whether they study foreign languages or any other subject, our students have come to academia because they want to achieve goals they have formulated for themselves in their own non-academic way. But learning the foreign discourse of an academic discipline will make them reach perhaps other goals than those they had intended, precisely because the language of academia is not the language of everyday life. It is this paradox that I try to understand in my teaching and my research.

In each of my classes, I do my best to spark students' interests while challenging their intellect. I try to create a context in which together we can experience new ways of seeing things that, at first sight, might look familiar-through a provocative text, an unsettling question, an insightful connection. These experiences may be triggered by the readings or the lectures, but it is in whole class or small group discussions that we highlight them, contextualize them, put them into relation with what others have said before, stress their significance within the totality of the syllabus. I never cease to be amazed at the fount of knowledge, life experience, and wisdom the students bring to the subject matter. Since my classes attract students from a variety of disciplines-education, English, foreign languages, political science, biology, cognitive science, linguistics-I always leave room in the syllabus for individual students'projects and presentations, in order to capitalize on this diversity.

Do I teach like a French person? Like a German? Like an American? I believe I have taken the best of all three traditions-the importance of language in intellectual pursuit, the love of the foreign and the paradoxical, the sensitivity to learners' interests and the passion for dialogue. And I have found at UC Berkeley the appropriate ground for them to flourish. That, at least, is what my students show me.

photo © Jane Scherr