L2 teaching and learning in Waldorf schools – why performative?

Abstract

This paper outlines the theory underpinning Waldorf L2 teaching and learning and shows that this approach requires performative methods. It provides a theoretical account that aligns with and underpins other articles in this issue of Scenario. It locates Waldorf language teaching within the overall frame of Waldorf pedagogy and its aims and in doing so the paper relates this approach both to Steiner’s educational ideas and to contemporary education science. The paper explains the thinking behind teaching two other languages from the age of six (grade 1) onwards and outlines the different approaches in the lower, middle and upper school. It supplements existing accounts within the Waldorf literature by opening this discourse to an interpretation of L2 pedagogy in the light of, for example, socio-cultural, usage-based approaches, the declarative/procedural model and complex dynamic systems theory and links the Waldorf approach to embodied cognition theory. The aim throughout is to explain why the Waldorf approach is or, in the author’s view, should be essentially performative.