By Jasper Heinzen, University of York
The pedagogy of History exhibits a paradox. Thanks in part to the Royal Historical Society’s ‘Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History’ report (2018), departments across the country have made strenuous effort to decolonise their curricula by broadening the range of scholarship students are exposed to. However, this literature remains predominantly monolingual, unlike most university reading lists elsewhere in Europe. The monolingualism of the teaching material reflects cultural assumptions about foreign languages. Since English has emerged as the global lingua franca, citizens can get by without knowledge of other languages and may even ascribe a lower value to the latter. As the linguist Claire Kramsch points out, ‘competition between the symbolic value of different languages’ has created an education system where ‘languages other than English compete unequally with English as a global language.’[1] The privileged position of English has left the breadth of the curriculum offered by most British universities in tension with the refraction of global cultural knowledge through the prism of one language.
The incentive for students to engage with foreign languages is furthermore dampened by the high benchmark for how proficiency is measured. Language assessment has expanded since the nineteenth century from a focus on translation and dictation to communicative performance, which encompasses a variety of skills areas such as listening, reading, speaking, and writing.[2] While this evolution has moved language assessment closer to scenarios of everyday language use, it has also debased proficiency in the lesser passive skills of communication. According to John Worne, the Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, ‘many people believe that unless they are completely fluent in another language, their linguistic skills have no value.’[3] Viewed in these terms, the many years of study and immersion required for complete fluency may well make the start-up costs seem unacceptable, especially since they psychologically place the learner in a position of inferiority to the native speaker until mastery has been achieved.
The objective of this project, supported by the award of an RHS Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowship, was to show students that minimal proficiency in a foreign language offers palpable rewards. The idea was born out of the observation that students’ enthusiasm for learning about European history – my area of specialisation – often stands in inverse relation to their risk-adverseness in the assessment, which makes them reluctant to experiment with sources beyond available translations. Yet the reliance on English translations limits students’ ability to experience the richness of a foreign culture to the full and leads to a preference for British perspectives on Europe, for which sources are more plentiful. The project was therefore designed to test whether students can be encouraged to adopt foreign source material in a controlled setting. To this end they were to be taught rudimentary German syntax. The load bearers in German sentences are nouns, which appear in a multitude of morphological combinations. Understanding how nouns are formed and relate to each other thus goes a long way towards catching the gist of a text. Students only need enough German to identify passages which merit closer scrutiny with the aid of translation software. Due to the common roots of English and German, it is possible to use familiar words and morphemes for orientation.
Design and execution of the project
My Special Subject ‘Prussia and the Unification of Germany, 1815-1918’ (taken by a maximum of 18 students per year) lent itself well to a language pilot. The module is assessed through essays at the end of each semester, which are structured around an analysis of contemporary primary sources. I recruited a seasoned tutor, Elinor Parks, to carry out the language instruction. She teaches on the BA in German Studies at Durham University, and has over ten years of experience in British higher education. At the start of the summer semester, by which point students had completed half of the module and were already conversant with the central themes of German history, I invited volunteers to attend classes offered over a 5-week period by Dr Parks. These sessions were held in addition to the regular contact hours for the module. It was made clear that participation in the pilot would not guarantee higher marks in the assessment but rather represented an opportunity to develop students’ transferable skills and broaden the range of primary sources at their disposal for the assessment. While I signposted potential sources in seminars throughout the semester to get students thinking about practical applications for their German, Dr Parks’ classes proceeded in the following way:
Session 1: Introduction to reading texts typed in the Fraktur font, deductive reasoning, identifying compound nouns, cognates and false friends, sentence structure and word order.
Session 2: Verb conjugation and word order – translating short sentences, infinitive clauses (multiple meanings of ‘zu’), modal verbs.
Session 3: Noun plurals, German cases, translating a historical source with the help of software and AI (Deep-L, Google Translate, Reverso, Pons, Chat GPT).
Session 4: German cases, recognising subjunctives, verbal brackets – translating a historical source with the help of software, the challenge of translating sources available as low-quality images typed in Fraktur.
Session 5: Review of German cases and word order, the passive voice, recognising German words in historical sources accessible only as images, challenging AI generated translations and adopting a critical comparative approach which makes use of more than one instrument.
Outcomes and insights
The pilot initially generated a lot of student interest. Seven people volunteered to join Dr Parks’ classes, but attendance dropped to just two after the introductory session. However, it is important to stress that the sudden fall in numbers was unconnected to Dr Parks’ teaching style, which was in fact singled out for praise. A survey I asked participants to complete at the end of the pilot found her ‘friendly and knowledgeable’ and noted that the ‘format of the tutoring had a good balance of teaching and class engagement.’ The low uptake rather seems to have been connected to structural factors. Although I had checked everyone’s availability at the start of the project, scheduling clashes nonetheless ensued. Dr Parks also highlights in her reflections on the pilot that many students appear to have underestimated the challenges that come with translating nineteenth-century German texts into modern English. Some terms are no longer in use, some grammar rules have changed, and some words carry different meanings today. An added complication, which students struggled more with than expected, is the unfamiliar typeface used in nineteenth-century German publications, Fraktur.
The fact that so many volunteers gave up after merely one session was nevertheless disappointing. Perhaps it offers proof for the ‘engagement problem’ that Sarah Jones and Simon Peplow have recently analysed in the Transactions. The pressure put on students by the cost-of-living crisis limits the available time for non-remunerated commitments. Added anxiety about career prospects is leaving students disillusioned with the teaching programme at universities, Jones and Peplow contend.[4] Their argument is persuasive because I have noticed that my Special Subject students have become progressively less interested over the years in exploring avantgarde themes that connect with modern societal issues. Instead, they ‘play it safe’ by choosing highly traditional topics for their essay projects that they already know from school, such as Prussian militarism, authoritarianism, and European imperial competition.
Worrying as the signs of an intellectual engagement problem are, they should not detract from other encouraging results of the pilot, which show that there is scope to continue experimenting with non-English sources. No fewer than six out of the sixteen submitted in the summer assessment for the Special Subject incorporated German sources. Four of these consisted of cartoons from contemporary satirical journals. In other words, students show an appetite for sources in the original language despite a reluctance to submit to the rigours of German tuition. The pilot proved particularly appealing to the one student in the module cohort that had a German A-Level. He welcomed the chance to build on the German he had learned in school and saw Dr Parks’ classes through to the end. His case demonstrates that students who have previously attained a level of proficiency in foreign languages benefit intellectually from refreshers, which create pathways for the continuous use of their skill throughout the history degree.
In sum, the pilot revealed that students appreciate some primary sources that are in the original language of the cultural region they are studying. While lessons on syntax are perhaps too demanding to become an integral feature of the module content, it is more than feasible to set time aside in seminars to familiarise students with historic fonts they are likely to encounter in contemporary publications. This knowledge is useful for deciphering visual sources that are accompanied by captions and commentaries. Deep-L, Google Translate, and similar software can translate these short texts easily enough without the student having to be proficient in the language. I plan on expanding the use of illustrated news and satirical journals in my Special Subject for this very reason. I am convinced as ever that breaking down apprehensions regarding the use of foreign languages is vital for the intellectual decolonisation of the curriculum at British universities, even if progress entails baby staps rather than quantum leaps.
Dr Jasper Heinzen is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York, specialising in the history of nineteenth-century Germany, prisoners of war and the institution of monarchy.
[1] Claire Kramsch, ‘Teaching Foreign Languages in an Era of Globalization: Introduction’, The Modern Languages Journal 98:1 (2014), p. 299.
[2] Nicola McLelland, Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages: A History of Language Education, Assessment and Policy in Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 224.
[3] John Worne, ‘The UK’s Language Crisis: Time to Embrace Our Imperfection?’, Language, Society & Policy, 24 March 2025, https://www.lspjournal.com/post/the-uk-s-languages-crisis-time-to-embrace-our-imperfection (accessed 28 June 2025).
[4] Sarah Jones and Simon Peplow, ‘Rethinking Engagement: Insights from UK History Departments’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2026), pp. 1-15 (doi:10.1017/S0080440126100747).
