3.3.1 Rationale for selecting Rosenheim-Cops

The TV-show selected for this class had to meet several criteria. First, since the course is part of a larger curriculum that is not task-based and relies on a textbook, the show had to connect to vocabulary and themes covered in concurrent chapters. Second, it had to be available and regularly accessible through the internet with stable technical support. Third, it had to be of interest to the learners. Rosenheim-Cops is a popular detective series in Germany, set in the Bavarian city of Rosenheim. A new episode airs every Tuesday evening on ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen). The stories are fast-paced and humorous, and provide many themes that are relevant to language learners (e.g. ordering food and using computers). Subtitles are available in German, providing learners with useful bimodal input. Finally, there had to be ample resources to provide and structure information pertaining to the setting, characters, and events, as well as to other viewers’ perception of the show.

3.3.2 Official resources for Rosenheim-Cops

Websites generate a complex web of interconnected multimodal discourses, such as written and spoken text, images, and sounds (Kress, Reference Kress2010; Norris, Reference Norris2004). Rosenheim-Cops is no exception. It has official websites (i.e. created by the TV-channel and program) but also links the reader/viewer/user to other related sites, with their integrated multimodal resources. The main portal is through the TV-station’s website.Footnote ² Links on the main page guide readers to other programs: on news, culture, feature films, sports, or travel shows, for example. The site uses a minimalistic sans serif font, which makes it look modern.

The show can be reached either through a link to the TV-program or through a program listing from A to Z in the top right-hand corner of the website. The latter approach is less daunting for beginner L2 learners, although the former offers more opportunities for unstructured individual exploration. Clicking on any of the letters brings up a small image of the TV-program, which acts as a visual hyperlink to the show. Participants in this study were excited to see some familiar names, some of which keep the English original titles (e.g. Mad Men), while others are Germanized to some extent (e.g. Raumschiff Enterprise (Star Trek)). The images serve an important function in orienting the viewer: they index comedy or drama by means of font, characters, or symbolism, as Figure 1 illustrates.

Fig. 1

Sample German TV-shows on ZDF

On the TV-show’s site, there is a steady background picture of the show’s setting, a link to the most recent episode and to the trailer of the next episode (Figure 2). There are additional links to a “making of” video (Hinter den Kulissen) and a weekly “Coptails” recommendation by one of the regular characters, Joe, who is the owner of the café lounge called TimesSquare, an important public space in the series, where casual exchanges convey personal information about the characters, and occasionally important cues in the investigation come to light.

Fig. 2

Rosenheim-Cops web portal

The interlinked portals – to ZDF, the alphabetical listing of programs, and Rosenheim-Cops itself – present culturally contextualized linguistic information. For example, time expressions and abbreviations for the days of the week are covered early on in the textbook, but here they become relevant, real-world constructs representing actual language as social action. The short summaries visible on the hyperlinked content boxes and the images complementing them can serve as advanced organizers, activating learners’ lexical and referential background knowledge. The brief summary of the most recent episode, located in the main content zone, presents key characters (other than the detectives) and the central problematic to be investigated.

The “making of” videos offer humorous repetitions of scenes and bloopers, which can help humanize learning for our students, demonstrating that even native speakers make mistakes; they also reiterate useful phrases. The film, the websites, and the complementary multimodal resources provide additional cultural contexts and layers (i.e. different types and modes) of information (Norris & Maier, Reference Norris and Maier2014) that learners can explore. For example, the videos and the surrounding information (e.g. titles and summaries) illustrate the influence of English on modern German. These layers of meaning, of cultural practices can be examined by beginner L2 learners, and affiliated websites offer further learning opportunities.

3.3.3 Affiliated resources for Rosenheim-Cops

In addition to the official websites of Rosenheim-Cops, Amazon.de has reviews of the show by viewers who watch it for pleasure, with a target audience of fellow viewers. These reviews provide their own multimodal contributions for L2 learners to explore. The familiar star-based rating system and genre of reviews help students interpret the accompanying textual information: a summary of key events or characters, and good or bad descriptions/descriptors.

Similarly, the Facebook site of Rosenheim-Cops links viewers to endless ideas they can pursue. The main page has an image of the Alps, information about the show (e.g. genre, a link to the show’s website, number of followers), photo albums, and a discussion zone where viewers leave messages, including text, images, and hyperlinks. The icon for the show and the photos of main characters provide a connection to and coherence with the official ZDF website. Additionally, the page has links to the main characters’ professional websites, to the Bavarian film city (one of Europe’s biggest film-making centres), and to other German shows.

There are further websites that provide social, cultural, historical, and geographical contexts for Rosenheim-Cops. Rosenheim and Bavaria have official tourist websites, offering background information to the setting of the show. Google maps and Google images serve as additional, multimodal sources of information that can enhance L2 learning through mutually reinforcing and complementary multimodal paths, as illustrated in Figure 3.

Fig. 3

Multimodal, interconnected websites for Rosenheim-Cops Note: solid lines on the boxes indicate webpages directly linked to and accessible from the sender’s website; dashed-lined boxes indicate related, but not directly linked, websites

4.1.1 Semiotic awareness

Learners’ responses on the handout systematically revealed that tasks helped raise their awareness of how modes and meaning-making work in the L2. That is, the tasks seemed to facilitate semiotic learning, even among early L2 learners. For example, they were able to interpret that police officers in the lower ranks had a different dress code than the detectives, and that the very strict police chief wore rather traditional, conservative clothing, echoing his personality. Learners also noted that friends in the lower ranks used informal forms of “you” between themselves, whereas two detectives at the same rank referred to each other with the formal “you” because one character had just joined the team. Furthermore, learners noted that long-time acquaintances (Frau Hofer and Frau Stockl) retained the formal “you” and used it even when they went to the spa to relax. Most students acknowledged during the focus-group discussion that the questions – and the pre- and post-viewing discussions in small groups – helped draw their attention to phenomena that they otherwise would not have noticed.

The German subtitles further raised learners’ awareness of the connections between different semiotic systems. For example, all learners noted that the subtitles helped them follow language and content, but also clarified how characters’ actions interplayed with their body language (e.g. power relationships). If the subtitles had been in English, participants added, they would have been paying attention to them at the exclusion of other semiotic layers. Humor was also typically indexed by laughter, which made them attend to the subtitles to figure out what the joke was. With the help of transcripts, participants later analyzed who was allowed to joke, and with whom. The written transcript of the episode also helped participants understand the dialog, reference unusual words (e.g. Gerichtsmedizinerin – coroner), and check characters’ names or the sequence of events.

After watching both episodes, participants reflected on how much the multimodality of the TV-series helped them understand what was going on in the story, adding layers of information: attitudes, identity issues depicted in language choice, for example. In contrast to reading a printed text, watching the actors perform what they were saying in specific locations provided crucial clues for comprehension. The actors’ websites and interviews with them on the show’s official website allowed participants to consider how much their off-screen personality was echoed by the on-screen one.

4.1.2 Accessing referential knowledge and multimedia literacy

On the handout and during the focus-group discussion, learners also reported relying on existing schemata to navigate the website of Rosenheim-Cops, the reviews on Amazon.de, and the Facebook page. For example, their existing knowledge of website organization helped them find the TV-show and recognize relevant links to the current episode, where to find a summary of it, and that the reviews pertained to the series rather than an individual episode.

Similarly, learners were able to apply information they had learned in language classes. Without exception, participants were able to draw on their knowledge of the German time system in official communication (24-hour clock) when figuring out when the episodes were to be broadcasted or how long they lasted. They also noted variation in phrases they learned from their textbook (e.g. greetings), which were realized differently among various characters. For example, one character comes from Northern Germany and uses a greeting typical for that region (“moin-moin”); in contrast, the other characters use greetings more common in Bavaria (“Servus” or “Grüss Gott”). About half of the students made the observation that the subtitles did not match the actual dialog; they used the simple past (typical of formal writing and speech) and omitted almost all greetings, while the conversations were mostly in the present perfect tense (typical of spoken or informal written language). This issue had been covered previously in the course, and it was recognizable for the students in situ.

Equally importantly, participants were able to tap into multimedia literacy skills they had developed in their first language (L1) in order to engage with the authentic resources relvant to the tasks in this study. Using Pegrum’s (Reference Pegrum2011) framework, several literacies were observabed. First, all learners navigated the target websites successfully (using laptops in the computer lab), even though they had never visited the sites before. They were able to find relevant links on the main official site to Rosenheim-Cops (search literacy) and stayed focused on the assigned tasks (filtering literacy). When writing their own reviews, they were able to identify positive and negative reviews on Amazon.de and model their own reviews on them, which they subsequently shared with their peers, creating new collective knowledge (information and network literacy). Finally, because tasks guided learners to examine cultural practices, language, and interaction in concrete cultural contexts, learners were able to identify similarities and differences between their own cultural practices and what they observed in the show (cultural and intercultural literacy). Since students represented an array of majors and diverse cultural backgrounds, they brought multiple interpretive filters with which to notice and analyze information.

4.1.3 Authentic resources

A further interesting aspect of the exercise was authenticity and task design. Most learners reported that they enjoyed working with real-world, authentic material that native speakers experience, even if, for the learners, the first segment was daunting. Breaking the episode into smaller segments and bracketing each with pre- and post-tasks made the exercise more manageable for learners. One could argue that such in-depth analytic tasks are not likely performed by native speakers, therefore these tasks are inauthentic. However, adult native speakers do, in fact, complete such analyses, interpreting multiple layers of images, sounds, language, and behaviors. They merely process this information quickly and automatically as part of socialization (Kress & van Leeuwen, Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2001), whereas L2 learners have to learn how to do such analyses explicitly.

Participants also enjoyed reading reviews on Amazon.de, agreeing or disagreeing with viewers’ comments, identifying and later adopting (for their own reviews) characteristics of the genre and expressions the reviewers used. Both the TV-show and the reviews allowed them to experience language modeled in socially-mediated contexts instead of being limited to the pedagogically prepared language samples used in typical textbooks (including that of the present author). Several students particularly enjoyed the challenge of authentic language, as CB’sFootnote ⁴ comment on the reaction questions illustrates: “I thought the show was challenging, but in a good way. I only got the general concept of everything but we need to step up our German and this is a great way to do it.” Similarly, SE “found the show helpful with learning new words… but the interviews and the Fb page were more helpful with learning how words are used in conversation, so more common words I need to know” (SE, one of the students going to Europe after the term ended). Although participants were not yet able to move beyond “informed reception of technology-mediated input” (Kurek & Hauck, Reference Kurek and Hauck2014: 120), they were able to recognize the usefulness of such linguistically and culturally contextualized resources.

Similarly, learners’ reviews mirrored authentic samples from Amazon.de, which are quite varied in length and focus. Some are short, some are long; some offer details about the plot, others review the actors’ performance. Tasks – if they are claimed to be real-world relevant, in line with TBLT (Ellis, Reference Ellis2003) – should have similar flexibility. Participants’ written movie reviews did, in fact, vary significantly. Several students in the focus-group discussions explained that they had identified a review they liked (e.g. in focus, language, style) and tried to emulate it. The narrative frame that participants used (present tense, simple past, conversational past) also varied, echoing the stylistic variation found in Amazon.de reviews. Thus the task had real-world relevance in that participants applied meaning and function to specific linguistic forms in line with their own communicative preferences (Ellis, Reference Ellis2003; Samuda & Bygate, Reference Samuda and Bygate2008). Having said that, participants unanimously stated that they would never normally write a review on Amazon.de, and therefore task-authenticity had its limitations. Although participants overwhelmingly reported enjoying and benefitting from working with Rosenheim-Cops, not all of their experiences were positive, however, as the discussion in Section 5 makes clear.

4.2.1 Participant variability

An important finding was the difference in learners’ ability to interpret, talk about, and build on the content of the episode and its embedded multimodal layers. By the end of the first year, there was already considerable variation among participants in terms of their language skills,Footnote ⁵ and variability was reflected in their performance on the tasks completed for this study as well. While it was a positive experience for most learners, five participants found the authentic language overwhelming and reported that they had “difficulty understanding even the gist, let alone any significant details of the plot” (RL – reaction questions). That some of their peers were able to follow events became a source of significant concern for these learners. Overlapping with feelings of frustration, they tended to respond to questions often or almost completely in English and were subsequently less likely to participate in small-group or whole-group discussions, which were typically in German.

Surprisingly, language perception varied among the participants. Although the instructors, who were language experts, noted both cognates (e.g. diskutieren – to discuss or das Rezept – recipe) or English borrowings (stalking or der Stalker), many learners in this study were unable to recognize such links between the L1 and L2. Hearing the dialog and watching the German subtitles provided crucial multimodal reinforcement for this lexical recognition skill, but participants’ cognitive abilities were not as instructors might have imagined.

Finally, participants brought their own personal preferences to the task, which helps make it more real-world on the one hand but limits its potential benefits on the other. This was the issue with tasks requiring participants to visit other websites. One student noted that she “did not find the other links interesting because this was not [her] favorite show, and [she] didn’t care about the extra information” (SL – reaction questions). Another student wrote that since he never looked up links to the shows he liked, he “really disliked having to do this for a show we only watched in class” (SQ – reaction questions).

4.2.2 Learner buy-in

While none of the study’s participants were planning to major in German, all of them were on the course out of interest. Therefore, the analytical skills and culturally situated insights they gained were considered to be a worthy endeavor. These tasks, however, did not feel relevant for two participants. Although they acknowledged that valuable L2 learning might have been taking place, they would have liked to do more worksheets to practice grammar, and felt that the TV-show did not meet their expectations for course activities. This was a curious finding, since the handouts and tasks asked questions using the two narrative structures for describing past events, the focal grammar structure in the chapters covered at the time; this fact was shared explicitly with the learners (Samuda & Bygate, Reference Samuda and Bygate2008). The police report, summary, and sequencing tasks reiterated and practiced these forms in a social context, but since they did not look “familiar”, learners did not recognize them as opportunities for practicing language form.

Several students also noted during the focus-group discussion that although they were very interested in watching authentic materials, they found the simplicity of the plots and the humor in Rosenheim-Cops “a bit hokey”. Another student felt that the light tone of the show was inappropriate for murder, while others found this “dark humor” appealing: “I was surprised by how funny [the show] was when I understood what was happening” (TH – reaction questions).