English
Teaching modern foreign languages at schools in conjunction with the ancient languages, can sometimes be problematic, what some of us would totally confirm. But not at Gymnasium Steglitz. Here, the talent of our students is usually a highly motivation for our work, as well as their interest to acquire skills in still flourishing languages, and not just in the ancient and practically unspoken ones.
So we use the roots of the European civilization for an as competent as possible analysis of our complex contemporary reality as it is the subject of our upper school classes (The Individual and Society, National and Cultural identiy, One World – Global Issues and Challenges of Today). The fact, that, at the end of the last year, most of our students were interested in the introductory annual tuition for the advanced English class, shows that we are obviously on the right track. For interests in the work results from different grades and levels, please have a look at our separate online division and our currently resurgent, award-winning English-speaking Internet- newspaper Intercultural Times. In addition, we encourage our students to continuously participate in foreign language competitions (The Big Challenge for the youngest grades 5 through 8, 2007/08 first-time participation, with two third state winners, next date 7 May 2009), in the translation competition iuvenes Trans-Lator (a multi-language competition this year on 27.11.2008) and of course for many years in the National Competition for Foreign Languages (individual and group competition).
In addition, for a while trips to English-speaking countries became a permanent part of our school life. In the school year 2007/08, our 9th and 11th grade classes traveled to the south of England and London, in the 2008/09 the advanced class of our seniors took part in a Shakespeare workshop in London and after that they went to Oxford. In the difficult searching for a British partnership school we had last year, we contacted a school in York and started having a lively exchange of letters with a 7th and a 10th grade class. Hopefully our strong wish for a partnership school will be fulfilled in the near future, despite the current matter of fact that in the UK schools are taking modern foreign languages less seriously.