PhD project
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Working title:
Approaches to a Theory of Textual Structures and their Didactics
Texts of German lessons which are used for teaching grammar are often artificial - this concerns both their content and their grammatical structure. This is because the teaching-learning materials are often designed for teaching purposes alone, so that certain syntactic structures dominate. It sometimes follows that these texts, which function as model linguistic texts for learners, paradoxically have a very different or quite different grammatical pattern than texts in the non-school text world that have not been developed or edited for school purposes (cf. Henckel 2018). When dealing with the teaching-learning materials, the focus is then usually solely on grammatical aspects. Content-related grammatical analyses reflecting the respective communicative-pragmatic framework are rarely included in textbooks, although the promotion of a comprehensive textual competence is one of the central goals of German lessons.
Based on these observations, the dissertation project addresses the overarching question of which teaching-learning materials enable target-language grammatical learning (Feilke/Tophinke 2016) for all students. The main focus is on the grammatical structures of texts in first, second and foreign language German. In addition, the tasks and exercises are reflected within grammar teaching-learning units. It is assumed that after the initial 'birth defect of German didactics' and the decades-long differentiation of first and foreign language didactics, an intensive alignment of both research areas against the background of inner and outer multilingualism can now bring meaningful insights and theory- as well as practice-related impulses.
Due to the intended interdisciplinarity, the work is based on different linguistic and language didactic theories and concepts, including: Sentence Structure Plans of Significant Semantics (Ágel/Höllein 2021), objects of varietal linguistic research (educational language, school language, technical language), textual procedures and literary practices (Feilke 2016, 2014, 2011, 1996), as well as linguistic and didactic views on textual competence (Coseriu 1988/2007, educational standards).