Doctoral Project
Working Title:
Approaches to a Theory of Text Structure Plans and their Didactics
Texts used in German lessons to teach grammar are often artificial - this applies to both their content and their grammatical form. This is because the teaching-learning materials are often designed solely for teaching purposes so that certain syntactic structures dominate. This sometimes means that these texts, which function as linguistic model texts for learners, paradoxically have a completely different grammatical pattern than texts from the non-school text world that were not developed or edited for school purposes (cf. Henckel 2018). When dealing with the teaching and learning materials, the focus is then usually solely on grammatical aspects. Content-related grammatical analyses that reflect the respective communicative-pragmatic framework are rarely included in textbooks, although the promotion of comprehensive text competence is one of the central goals of German lessons.
Based on these observations, the doctoral project is dedicated to the overarching question of which teaching and learning materials enable target language grammatical learning (Feilke/Tophinke 2016) for all students. The main focus is on the grammatical structures of texts in German first, second and foreign language lessons. 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 comparison of both research areas against the background of internal and external multilingualism can now provide meaningful insights and theoretical and practical impulses.
Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the project, the work is based on various linguistic and language didactic theories and concepts, including: Sentence structure plans of significant semantics (Ágel/Höllein 2021), objects of variety linguistic research (educational language, school language, technical language), text procedures and literary practices (Feilke 2016, 2014, 2011, 1996) as well as linguistic and didactic views on text competence (Coseriu 1988/2007, educational standards).