Editorial This is a revised version of a paper Basic global english: A Leaner More Learnable Lingua Franca for Pluralingual Pedagogies, BETA E-Newsletter, No.11, May-June 2014, 8-30.

Basic global english: A Leaner Lingua Franca for Equality in Global Communication

Bill Templer, Bulgaria

Bill Templer is a Chicago-born educator and translator with research interests in English as a lingua franca, critical pedagogy, socialist/Marxist transformative policy for education, and Extensive Reading methodologies. He has taught in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, Israel/Palestine, Austria, Bulgaria, Iran, Nepal, Thailand, Laos and Malaysia. Bill is on the IATEFL GISIG Committee (gisig.iatefl.org/about-us), is editor/Eastern Europe with the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (www.jceps.com), and a widely published translator from German. He is chief translator for the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, University of Leipzig (www.dubnow.de) and is based as an independent researcher in Shumen in eastern Bulgaria. E-mail: bill_templer@yahoo.com

Menu

Ideal vs. reality in ELT
Thinking out of the box
EFL for limited learner needs
BGE
LWO - Language Workout Method
Learning by teaching, LdL
Kindred vistas, other options
Conclusion
Appendix 1
References

This article introduces BASIC GLOBAL ENGLISH (BGE), developed in Germany, as a sustainable alternative compact, rapidly learnable communicative code, re-envisioning the ‘E’ in ELT. In my view, BGE or an analogue could become a potential ‘game-changer’ in a future TEFL oriented to “equality in communication” (Phillipson, 2003, 167) across borders and cultures, and a paradigm shift to a pedagogy of ‘plurilingualism’ (CoE, 2001, 4-5; 168-76; polyglattaly, 2012; Byram & Parmenter, 2012), where a simple basic ‘partial’ proficiency in English is for many more than enough. The present article is in the spirit of an earlier article in HLT (Templer, 2005), but proposes a serious look at BGE at an elementary target plateau level of 1,000-word core lexis—a “thrifty vocabulary” for “everyday dealings and explanations”—as Ivor Richards (1943, 114) characterized Ogden’s Basic English. Target plateau means enough for most learners, a base camp to stay in and really learn well as part of one’s ‘plurilingual competencies’ instead of the long climb up the towering Everest of ‘full’ English—‘realistic English’ rather than ‘real English’ (Seidlhofer, 2003). The deepened discussion of ‘plurilingualism’ and its alternatives is clearly on the agenda (CMLR, 2014).

Ideal vs. reality in ELT

In a recent interview, Dr Ellie Boyadzhieva (2014, 9-10) expressed her doubts, based on years of experience and recent empirical data, about the effectiveness of current EFL teaching in the Bulgarian schools: “Unfortunately, my impression is that the widely shared views that ‘everybody in BG speaks some English’, and ‘there are no real beginners today’ are just myths. This impression is based on the following data coming from two recent tasks I had to do for my university.”

She then went on to describe findings from an examination of students across several years of undergraduate study in fields other than English studies at South-West University “Neofit Rilski” in Blagoevgrad, where she is based. These indicated that students who had had 7 years of school study of English, of 1170 students who took the exam, 558 (47.69%) were at level А1, 391 (33.41%) were on level А2 (a total of 81.8% at beginner level). 199 students (17%) were assessed as B1, and only 22 (0.018%) at level B2. None were above that.

We also know that this reflects another fact: namely that many better students in Bulgaria are going abroad to study—and perhaps stay there as emigrants, a form of pre-university teen brain drain. Dr. Boyadzhieva also briefly described an English course prepared for the academic staff at South-West University, where some 160 staff members applied to participate: “About 80 of them signed up for the beginner’s groups and among them about 50% were real beginners.” She noted: “Of course, the age range varied between 30 and 60 and this matters in the light of the English teaching.” I comment on teaching adults below and this is also underscored quite surprisingly in Appendix 1, a recent news report on teaching BGE to senior citizens in Bavaria.

Dr. Boyadzhieva stressed:

The figures, however, show that the level of competence in English acquired in the Bulgarian ‘common’ schools is quite low. Some of my students at the New Bulgarian University where English at B2 is a requirement for graduation in every major say that they have been studying English for over 10 years and every time they have to start a course they start from the beginner’s level as they feel they do not know it well enough (p. 10).

Her conclusion: “in my opinion ELT as promoted by the Ministry of Education for the common state secondary schools shows dramatically bad results despite the widespread view that it is one of the pillars in the compulsory education in general.”

Thinking out of the box

These observations point up a serious problem in EFL instruction in Bulgaria, and reflect a situation not uncommon elsewhere: hundreds of thousands of boy/girl hours wasted in trying to learn a language that is in effect going in one ear and out the other. Recent observations from Turkey corroborate this malaise, where “more than 90 percent of Turkish students cannot progress beyond basic language skills even after 1,000 hours of English training, according to a joint report from the British Council and TEPAV” (Boyacıoğlu, 2014). In Saudi Arabia, Almaeena (2014) confirms a similar depressing reality. In Southeast Asia, teachers in Vietnam often face huge classes of 60-90 students, many from poverty backgrounds, where it is a problem to keep kids awake or even manage the din of a boisterous large class, let alone impart knowledge (Tran, 2014). In Thailand, Graham (2006) notes that of the 3,500 university students he tested for placement in northeastern Thailand, the vast majority were classed at beginner level after nine years (!) of formal instruction, in part a common Thai analogue to Dr. Boyadzhieva’s findings. Thailand currently has the demonstratively weakest learner performance in English and lowest EFL standard of proficiency in Southeast Asia (Kaewmala, 2012; Saiyasombut, 2013); James (2010) is particularly incisive in her critique of Thailand’s English language woes.

This is partially the result of the pervasive impact of ‘class in the classroom.’ In a slew of developing and developed economies, much EFL instruction is aimed at learners from more privileged socioeconomic strata. With some exceptions, they are the few who may to rise to C1. So the social class gap, which is widening, should be openly addressed and called by name. The “Matthew effect” (the rich get richer, gaps widen) is much in evidence in our profession (Rigney, 2010a; 2010b), and in many nations, we live in an intensifying “age of the wealth gap” (Taibbi, 2014). That is reflected in the vast disparity between learners in a number of countries, and in part reflects the A2/B1 majority of learners (or learners at false beginner level after many years of instruction), and a quite small generally more privileged minority rising to B2/C1 levels and beyond. Elliott (2014) talks about working with LAPS (“lower attaining pupils”) and HAPS (“higher attaining pupils”). Across the profession, ELT is repeatedly scripted to target the more privileged learners, the HAPS, reproducing and strengthening interest in English not as a lingua franca but indeed a lingua economica (Phillipson, 2003, 149). ‘Money talks—money talks English.’ The EU, itself elitist and run by dedicated technocrats, tends to exacerbate these inequities in social, cultural and ‘learning’ capital (Reich, 2013, 297-368) pervasive within its education systems, promoting English as the virtual ‘default’ language of wider communication (LWC) across the topography of neoliberal globalization (Phillipson, 2003, 169)—whether most learners will ever really ‘need’ it or not.

EFL for limited learner needs

A key underlying thesis here: Standard English is climbing an Everest of complexity that most ordinary learners, the millions of LAPS, don’t need and are often intimidated by. I would argue that this EFL inequity poor achievement of many ordinary learners should be a wake-up call: to proceed in second-language policy down a different path: developing a compact form of English for international communication for limited possible learner needs, a basic tool for everyday plaintalk that most ELLs can add to their skill kit without struggling to spend hundreds of hours trying to develop proficiency in a difficult global language. This entails in effect rejecting the “maximalist principle” (Templer, 2005; 2008; 2009; 2011; 2012a; 2013) oriented to “meritocratic” values. Training teachers to a good fluent level in such a mini-English is likewise a lot easier. In many countries, there are few primary teachers of English, especially outside the major cities, as in Uruguay (Ceibal, 2014; Stanley, 2014). To my mind, this is basically in line with Phillipson’s (2003, 167ff.) concern for a “language for equality in communication,” although there he stresses the potential of Esperanto as a viable future option, an excellent component in a pluralingual ensemble not dominated by a near monopolizing stress on English. Shifting to a focused pedagogy of a compact form of English is also largely in sync with such a plurilingual approach that emphasizes building up

a communicative competence to which all knowledge and experience of language contributes and in which languages interrelate and interact. In different situations, a person can call flexibly upon different parts of this competence to achieve effective communication with a particular interlocutor. […] From this perspective, the aim of language education is profoundly modified. It is no longer seen as simply to achieve 'mastery' of one or two, or even three languages, each taken in isolation, with the 'ideal native speaker' as the ultimate model. Instead, the aim is to develop a linguistic repertory, in which all linguistic abilities have a place (CoE, 2001, 4-5).

That repertory can be chronicled and self-assessed in the ELP (European Language Portfolio) “by recording learning experiences of all kinds over a wide range of languages, much of which would otherwise be unattested and unrecognised” (CoE, 2001, 20). Various chapters in Byram & Parmenter (2012) indicate that the ELP and associated Common European Framework of Reference have had very mixed reception to date in a number of countries, particularly in the context of plurilingualism as the CEFR defines it.

A target level of around 1,000 lexemes rigorously recycled, much graded reading at that A2 level, might be enough for the greater majority of learners, allowing more time in the curriculum for short-changed focal areas, like critical thinking, pressing global issues, other languages, and importantly, basic literacy in ‘minority languages’ the pupils may speak at home as L1, such as Turkish and Romanes in Bulgaria (Templer, 2012b). This while simultaneously facilitating a substantial savings in the staggering investment today globally in time and money by all harried stakeholders to ‘master’ English. Instead, create a syllabus to build fluency in a ‘downshifted’ form of the language for most genuine basic needs. Much of what Seidlhofer (2002) says about Ogden’s experiment in BASIC English can be applied in part likewise to Grzega’s BASIC GLOBAL ENGLISH, discussed below. She bemoans:

foreign language teaching in schools usually amounts to a large investment of time (often nine years or more) and resources (many specialist teachers of individual languages) into an educational undertaking which in many cases is doomed to failure, as most learners neither achieve a significantly heightened general language awareness nor really satisfactory communicative abilities in one foreign language, let alone in several.

Her 2002 article (online) remains basic reading for a paradigm shift in English as a lingua franca (see also Seidlhofer, 2003; and on ELF, Kohn, 2012a, 2012b; 2012c). Such a compact form of English, learned as a plateau target level, could serve the needs of (a) the large majority of ordinary LAP learners in the schools everywhere, taught to a level of ‘A2 fluency’; (b) various groups of potential future labor migrants going to work abroad anywhere; (c) underprivileged children from backgrounds where learners leave school at an earlier age, such as the Roma communities in the Balkans, or the huge numbers of out-of-school children in many corners of the Global South, Pakistan one example, with over 5 million kids out of school (Shaukat, 2012); (d) older adults, including pensioners, eager to acquire a basic knowledge of communicative English for simple purposes. (see Appendix 1), or even other school and university staff, who have never learned much of the language, as Dr. Boyadzhieva (2014) mentions. BGE is also relevant to the huge problems faced by hard-strapped adult immigrant ELLs in the U.S., as described in Cardoza (2013). Of course, learners could later build on that knowledge if they so desire, moving on to B1 and higher proficiency levels. But the goal would be relative fluency and mastery of a much simpler, in effect ‘non-native’ code—an enhanced lean & effective ‘survival English,’ or ‘English Lite,’ at mid-to-upper A2 level, ultimately promoting greater “equality in communication” à la Phillipson (2003). It is a potential ‘paradigm shift’ experiment calling for serious empirical research (Templer, 2011). Can it work, and if so how? As a further slightly more advanced tier, VOA Special English can be learned as a second-level target plateau of 'plaintalk' proficiency (Templer, 2013).

Below some introductory pointers to one such plaintalk communicative option: BASIC GLOBAL ENGLISH.

BGE

BASIC GLOBAL ENGLISH, developed by linguist Dr. Joachim Grzega (formerly Catholic University, Eichstätt, Bavaria and Director, European House, Pappenheim), is centered on a vocabulary of ca. 1,000 words. As Dr. Grzega (2006) notes:

BGE is based on findings from successful communication between non-natives. It includes only 20 grammar rules and consists of a basic vocabulary of 750 words (that is not bound to any specific single culture). In addition, learners are asked from the very beginning to do dictionary work and collect another 250 words (e.g. word-fields on hobbies or professions of family members). Additional rules for word-formation enable the learner to form a lot more than 1,000 words. Moreover, phrases for the most basic and frequent communicative situations are offered. Unlike, BASIC English, BGE is not a closed system, but allows variation and offers the learner to fine-tune his command of an internationally useful variety of English according to one's own wants and needs.

A good introduction to BGE is presented by its author in a two-part online interview: Part 1: (youtu.be/B0iGgshLzxI). Part 2: (youtu.be/D8JWMAbM29o). Spend 16 minutes and you will obtain an excellent overview direct from Dr. Grzega about what he has in mind. Appendix 1 below contains an excerpt from a recent article in a local northern Bavarian newspaper on teaching BGE to a group of older German adults, aged 55 to 91, with great success and learner satisfaction: The broader work in EuroLinguistiX being done under Dr. Grzega at the European House in Pappenheim can be explored here (goo.gl/Nfxhss). Joachim Grzega also edits the journal EuroLinguistiX, which he founded in 2004 (goo.gl/KlHsj).

Grzega (2009) stresses:

The basic idea of teaching BGE is to enable learners, as quickly as possible, global communication in English (in its internationally functional form) in an atmosphere of tolerance and empathy; beside linguistic competence, students should also acquire social and methodological competences (for situations in which there is a lack of words or in which there is a certain discomfort or misunderstanding). Thus students should be given opportunities to make creative and interactive use of English as much as possible. The focus is on vocabulary acquisition (a common vocabulary and an individual vocabulary relevant to one’s own life) and communicative strategies, while grammar and pronunciation rules are taught only when they are important in lingua franca English. […] Teaching and learning of cultural knowledge is not related to the UK or the US, but to foreign countries important to the learner group or foreign countries in general.

BGE includes fundamental concepts that lie in part behind Ogden/Richards’ BASIC English (Templer 2005; 2012a), Stein and Quirk’s Nuclear English, and van EK and Alexander’s Threshold Level English. As Grzega (2005: 66) states: “BGE should be seen as ● a (fast) start for learners of English, open for developing larger skills of all kinds of Englishes (according to the learners’ individual wants) ● reduced but still natural, not artificial English […] ● English for international contexts.” He discusses there just how his conceptions differ from Nuclear English, Threshold Level and Ogden/Richards’ BASIC, with a detailed presentation of his choice of core vocabulary, including a full list of his 750 core-lexeme vocabulary (pp. 81ff.). He notes (2005: 67, 80-81):

I think that BGE in all its areas (sounds, politeness strategies, vocabulary and grammar) can at least be covered in about 30 hours, but the learning process, or memorization process, will depend on the intervals between lessons, on the intensity of actual practice and on a learner’s natural gift for languages. […] Ogden’s principle was to chose 850 words: this would enable to learn 30 words in one hour per day and learn the BASIC English vocabulary in less than a month. The concrete vocabulary items were selected by Ogden’s experience of 10 years. Ogden’s choice was notion-based. BGE, however, wants to respect both the needs for active communication and the needs for passive understanding

Moreover, “in BGE only those non-standard pronunciations are penalized that have been proven to endanger communicative success between non-natives,” and “BGE lists only 20 elementary grammar rules. […] Additional word-formation patterns provide the learner with the means to coin much more than 1,000 words” (Grzega & Schöner, 2007, 6).

Furthermore, BGE includes internationally functional phrases […] for the most basic and frequent communicative situations, including solutions for situations of communicative breakdown. Another important aspect is that BGE is not a closed system, but allows variation and offers learners to fine-tune their command of an internationally functional English according to their own desires (ibid.).

You can download a copy of Grzega’s Welcome to the World! textbook at (goo.gl/lEMLVS). Also available there is a preface to the teacher handbook for the textbook Hello World! (goo.gl/NrDHoZ). This preface is in English and can give you a better idea and sample of how BGE builds communicative skills right from the earliest lessons, and concentrates on a quite limited high frequency vocabulary of some 1,000 words, although somewhat different in lexis from Ogden/Richards original BASIC English 850, and far more communicatively oriented right from the start. A workbook for Hello World! is here: (goo.gl/WiXS27). BGE has largely been limited to very promising experiments in southern Germany, in a variety of teaching ecologies. Grzega & Schöner (2007) report in detail on one experiment teaching BGE to learners 7-9 years old in two schools in southern Germany. Experimentation here in Bulgaria and elsewhere, with associated empirical class research on effectiveness and learner response, is highly desirable. It can also be combined with use of a ELP portfolio for self-assessment and progress at the target level, enabling an individual to record and present different aspects of his/her language biography, including minority home languages and how they are used (DoE, 2001, 175; Byram & Parmenter, 2012).

LWO - Language Workout Method

Dr. Grzega and his associates have also experimented with a new approach for beginners, linked with BGE but applicable to learning other additional languages:

In a few hours, learners acquire skills for large aspects of the A1 language level (as defined by the EU). This is achieved by (1) a selection of items (words/phrases/structures) based on situational relevance, multi-contextual applicability and frequency, (2) an empathetic teacher guiding learners to the answer and including body-movement elements, (3) learners in a comfortable semi-circle, watching and listening without taking notes, (4) the presentation of new items in the source language and in the target language (with a literal translation), the indication of morpheme boundaries and a memory hook, (5) translation exercises, (6) conversational exercises with elements of LdL (Lernen durch Lehren ‘Learning by Teaching’), (7) revision sections according to LdL (Grzega, 2013, 76).

Teachers in Bulgaria and elsewhere are urged to explore LWO as a new experimentally tested approach for beginners of any age. Grzega’s articles (2006; 2013) are a clear introduction.

Learning by teaching, LdL

In part, BGE and LWO also seek to use a method called ‘learning by teaching’ being elaborated in Germany, (termed LdL, Lernen durch Lehren, principally developed by Dr. Jean-Pol Martin, a French language pedagogue, see (www.ldl.de), where learners also become mini-teachers presenting materials and in effect tutoring their classmates. Here a brief overview in English: (goo.gl/5KvdB). “The methodological core idea is to have a pair or group of students instruct the majority of topics (selected by the teacher or by the students themselves) to their classmates, but in a way that activates their classmates’ participation and communication in the best possible way” (Grzega & Schöner, 2008, 169), working in small groups. Tran (2014, 10) also uses some analogous techniques in her huge classes in Vietnam, as does Elliott (2014, 8), especially in working with mix-ability groups. LdL is likewise well worth experimentation elsewhere. Like BGE, much of LdL’s hands-on use in school and university pedagogy has been in Germany, where it was developed at the grassroots, with much experimentation. LdL needs to be more widely discovered and inventively applied.

Kindred vistas, other options

Conclusion

Promoting a ‘people’s English’ as a leaner highly compact mini-language of wider communication (MLWC) should be on the democratic agenda, oriented to the mass of ordinary learners, and particularly the multitudes of LAPS (Elliott, 2014)—not the technocratic elites, their ‘knowledge economies’ (Rubdy & Tan, 2008, 205) and privileged strata.

Most administrators and many in our teaching profession tend to be locked in the self-crafted cages of our inherited and inculcated mindsets. It is a bit like what Margaret Heffernan (2011) calls “willful blindness”: why we ignore the obvious, even the elephant in the EFL room, choosing “not to know. … better not to see this stuff at all” (Heffernan, 2013). As Einstein famously cautioned: “We can’t solve today’s problems with the same mindset that created them.” The recent call by a key journal in Canada for a special issue on the topic “From second language pedagogy to the pedagogy of ‘plurilingualism’: a possible paradigm shift” (CMLR, 2014) reflects broadened approaches to what plurilingual pedagogies might begin to explore.

I think brainstorming about and experimenting with such simpler codes of English, such as BGE, should be high on the priority agenda in ELT in Bulgaria, across the Balkans and elsewhere, particularly in most lower-income economies. In Bulgaria, recent data indicate that 54% of Bulgarian university graduates are working at jobs in the country that do not require a university degree (Novinite, 2014a; 2014b). Similar situations exist in a range of other economies, in an era of mounting massive youth unemployment, mass trans-border labor migration and staggering underemployment—even in the U.S., “the number of college graduates toiling in minimum wage jobs is roughly 71% higher today than in 2004” and the number of graduates with masters degrees working in part-time jobs is 3x higher than in 2006 (O’Connell, 2014). Yet resistance is mounting from below to the System’s contradictions and paradoxes, in Seattle and elsewhere (Sawant, 2014; Liberation Radio, 2014).

For Bulgarian university graduates, whether their knowledge of English matters and can be applied is open to empirical research. In some service jobs in tourism, various corporations and foreign-supported NGOs, it is needed. Yet many become part of a growing Bulgarian ‘precariat’: workers with little or no job security, living literally at the edge. Or of course they flee the country to build a life elsewhere, what Bauman (1998, 91-102) calls the new “vagabonds,” a paradigm of uprooting and dispossession in the existential centrifuges of globalization—with English as part of their ‘survival toolbox.’ But English should not be a skill that is serving to help shrink the population of Bulgaria and propel its youth abroad, never to return. The ongoing street protests in Bulgaria since June 2013 have many been in significant part specifically about this pressure to emigrate to survive, the huge forced population exodus due largely to the ‘capitalism-reborn’ economy and its aporia in post-socialist freefall.

Some argue that English has become part of the ‘commodity fetishism’ so dominant in our cultures, itself a discursive ‘commodity’ and fetish-object (Wiki, 2014; Rubdy & Tan, 2008), welded to the incessant “overselling of false promises of employment and economic success through English” (Skutnabb-Kangas & Heugh, 2012, 270), what Singh & Han (2008) call the “commoditization of English” as product and service. Whether another simpler international auxiliary language like Esperanto (Phillipson, 2003, 169-73) could come to replace near-monopolistic reliance on English, as a kind of Hydra-headed neo-imperial monster, with its huge negative washback effects on local and minority languages (Rapatahana & Bunce, 2012), remains an open question.

In Bulgaria, teaching a workable, compact plateau level of English like BGE—while aiming at an ensemble of plurilingual competencies as envisioned by CEFR—could encourage developing additional literacy and oralcy, even at basic 1,000-word levels, in second-languages other than English, such as the vernaculars of close neighboring countries like Romania, Greece and Turkey. It could also open the door (and provide needed time in the curriculum) for developing greater bilingual literacy training at school for L1 speakers of Turkish and Romanes in Bulgaria, still highly controversial here (Templer, 2012b), as authors writing in Skutnabb-Kangas & Heugh (2012) would strongly recommend for building overall literacy. What is needed across Europe and beyond is to begin to interrogate English language hegemony in its current constellations, its fetishism (Baumeister, 2006; Wiki, 2014) and commodification (Rubdy & Tan, 2008), transforming English teaching in more equitable, multicultural directions (Rapatahana et al., 2015), within an authentic plurilingual paradigm shift (CMLR, 2014).

A classic poem expressing this need for a plurilingual shift and ‘mother-tongue multilingual education’ (MLE) by Tanzanian-born linguist Dainess Maganda (2012) is “Who am I?”, which I recommend EFL teachers everywhere should read and ponder. A few of its haunting lines: “I am a lost identity / […] I am a shuttered mind / I am a mumbling mouth / I don’t know who I am / I was born with a voice but lost it / I am told English is all that matters … I am told my identity doesn’t matter […] I am taught to learn what is popular / I am told to ignore who I am […] The world tells me / Don’t worry, / You don’t need to learn in a language you understand / Because it is not the language of power […]”

Appendix 1

“Basic Global English” - A Course in the European House Pappenheim

He learned English at the age of 91. Hans Navratil was the oldest participant in the course, the youngest aged 55. Important basic knowledge learned in only 16 two-hour class sessions. Pappenheim/Bavaria:

Hans Navratil decided to try his luck and successfully completed a course in “Basic Global English” in the European House in Pappenheim. After 16 two-hour classes, he and the other course participants can now communicate in a simple but effective way about personal things, everyday matters and experiences. They can manage typical situations encountered when traveling and can cope with emergency situations using English, and they have acquired useful knowledge and skills for international communication.

The course director Prof. Joachim Grzega felt the beginning of the course was an interesting but huge challenge, since almost all the participants were older than his customary students in the past. He was pleased that they demonstrated in the end: people aged 55 to 91 can learn a first foreign language just as well as younger learners. Of course, none of the participants speaks English now like a native after only 16 weekly lessons, two hours long. But that’s not the point, as Dr. Grzega stresses. His BGE concept teaches students to be able to communicate and make themselves understood internationally in a range of basic situations. […]

The participants were also surprised about themselves at times, finding they were able to deal well with oral tests or understand texts above their basic level. In order to stay active and in practice, they plan to meet during the summer for free conversation (translated from: Weißenburger Tagblatt, 2014).

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