Glottodidactica. An International Journal of Applied Linguistics

In search of reflective techniques in preservice teacher education: Collaboration with parents inspired by school placements

2020-01-30T08:50:17+00:00

This paper addresses a problem which has been central in teacher education for several decades: how to encourage critical reflectivity in prospective EFL1 teachers. This problem is set within the larger context of the field of school, family and community partnerships. The rationale behind choosing this context is that there is a gap between the significance of various types of such partnerships for the well-being of the whole child, and a lack of deeper understanding of the issue among prospective teachers. The overwhelming majority of research in the matter, conducted mainly in the USA, covers the areas of pre-school, early school and special education (e.g. Lindberg 2014). Additionally, there are few research-based articles related to building the partnership skills of preservice EFL teachers. Therefore, in this paper we attempt to describe the cases of three prospective EFL teachers involved in the process of preparing small scale empirical projects related to the parents’ perspectives. As shown in the paper, engagement in such long term and complex enterprises does not automatically develop the subjects’ deeper understanding of the important role of various types of parent involvement in the (academic) success of children.

Vulgäre und derbe Idiome im Deutschen. Einige Bemerkungen zu ihrer Bedeutung, Frequenz, Stilmarkierung und ihrem Gebrauch

2020-01-30T08:49:46+00:00

In the context of this article, the crude and vulgar idioms mentioned in Duden-11 “Redewendungen” will be examined in terms of their motivation, meaning, frequency, style marking and their usage. First, they will be extracted from this dictionary and examined according to their origins. Next, they will be categorized concerning their subjects. Furthermore, the style tags used in the dictionary will be tested. This will be done by contrasting them to reference corpora before carrying out a survey among native speakers. Finally, a list of common, relatively frequent idioms will be created, which can then be used primarily in foreign language didactics.

Übersetzungsstrategien von Grimms Rotkäppchen am Beispiel polnischer Übersetzungen

2020-01-30T08:50:49+00:00

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm belong to the best-known literary works of Germany, besides the Luther Bible. They are currently published in 160 languages and have been part of the World Documentary Heritage since June 2005. In Poland, they are known in countless translations, adaptations and retellings, some of which have been greatly modified and adapted for teaching purposes and others are literally based on the original texts. The empirical part of the article refers to an experiment in which 19 subjects were presented with a translation task: to transfer selected passages of Little Red Riding Hood into Polish. In the runup to the study, it was hypothesized that the information about the status of the work as part of the World Document Heritage given to study participants should have an effect on the literal translation. The results of the experiment do not confirm the assumed hypothesis, but clearly show that the translation variants above all have to be seen as a continuation of the individual’s experiences with the fairy tale, which strongly influences that individual’s translation

Eine Fallstudie über die regionalen Unterschiede der ungarischen Schülerleistungen

2020-01-30T08:51:41+00:00

The sociocultural and socioeconomic background of pupils is a determinant for their learning process and it has an effect on their learning success and on how easily pupils are able to master the requirements set by school curricula and how they perform on different measuring tasks. This is the reason why we compare in our paper the reading and mathematics results of the National Competence Measurement 2013 with the English and German language results of the secondary school-leaving exams in foreign languages regarding the same pupils. We analyse the data using the SPSS program and we present the results using the MapInfo program. We examine the effects of pupils’ social background, the interactions of different subjects and their regional projections as well. The pupils’ achievements show the same pattern as the development patterns of different geographical areas in Hungary.

So-called dictionary equivalents confronted with parallel corpora (and the consequences for bilingual lexicography)

2020-01-30T08:52:20+00:00

The study considers the question of whether (and how) bilingual dictionaries may be improved. The information presented in dictionaries has been confronted with textual reality (i.e., with examples of actual translations), based on the German expression fassungslos and its Polish equivalents in parallel texts. The author assumes that bilingual dictionaries are mainly used by language learners, while professional translators may consider them as one of many possible sources. In teaching, multiplying the possible equivalents or suggesting ad hoc solutions is generally not recommended. Despite the attempts at objectivizing lexicographic descriptions, which are made possible by using language corpora, it often turns out that the decisions made by dictionary authors are (and need to be) arbitrary

Literalität in kinderund jugendliterarischen Werken

2020-01-30T08:52:56+00:00

The article starts with a discussion of the essential theories of literature. It focuses on the historical development of books for children and young-adults. Worldwide there are three childhood myths, which are unfolded in successful children's books and which correspond to socially conditioned concepts of childhood. The Enlightenment childhood utopia sees children as promising for the future and improving human relationships. This idea explains the phenomenal resonance of books with educational and instructive concepts. In the 20th and 21st centuries this concept has become very popular again. By contrast, Romanticism developed another, second childhood myth, which combines not a future but a paradisiacal past with the image of childhood. In doing so, the holistic and naïve childlike world reference is stylized into an ideal that expresses the backward-looking yearning of adults. In addition to the Enlightenment and the Romantic childhood myths, there is a third, a negative view of childhood, which has also found expression in children's classics worldwide. This refers to the myth of the evil child, who is originally committed to the Christian doctrine of original sin. In the next step the article traces different modes of reading. These are the literary mode and documentary/pragmatic mode. Then, based on fragments taken from children’s and juvenile books from different periods, the article demonstrates the role of literacy in texts written for children and young adults, and the role of children and young-adult books for reading competence. While the paper examines these ideas within different novels though history, it also raises questions about the aesthetics and epistemic value of literature

Verbzweitsätze aus kontrastiver Sicht (Deutsch-Italienisch): Das topologische Modell zur Verbstellung

2020-01-30T08:53:33+00:00

The present paper focuses on the syntactic description of verb-second-sentences from a contrastive view (German-Italian). The study is based upon a corpus of texts written by Italian native speakers of the course German Language for Tourism at the University of Pisa. This paper is composed of two parts: the first one aims at pointing out the main grammatical structural differences between Italian and German declarative sentences as far as the position of the verb is concerned; the second one shows the results gained by analysing the corpus of written texts referring to the position of the verb in declarative sentences in order to provide a successful methodological approach to verb-second-sentences in the didactics of German as foreign language

From EFL classroom language to classroom lexicon: Importing formulaic story language into teacher talk

2020-01-30T08:53:59+00:00

This paper reports on a language activity carried out in an Italian University with student teachers attending a primary education course. The activity was designed to train them to use authentic children’s picturebooks as a source for EFL language learning. It consisted of identifying and ‘noticing’ (Mackey 2006) multiword expressions and ready-made utterances in a number of authentic picturebooks and simulating instances of weaving the picturebook language into the fabric of daily classroom talk. Following the activity, the students wrote individual pieces of reflective writing describing their experience. Comments by student teachers assessed the use of picturebook-derived formulaic language on both their learning and perceived ability to teach English, and revealed much about their pedagogical perspectives on teacher talk. Results suggest that promoting the use of authentic and meaningful language in context can help student teachers conceive of classroom communication as lexicon (a shared communicative practice the rules of which are fully known only by a restricted community of speakers) rather than mere language-based interaction

Stereotypen geht es gut. Ein Beitrag zu stereotypischem Denken polnischer und deutscher Studierender am Beispiel eines E-Mail-Tandemprojekts

2020-01-30T08:54:30+00:00

The article attempts to approach stereotypes from both the theoretical and empirical perspectives. First, it endeavours to explain the term “stereotype”, looks into its characteristics and functions and then presents selected aspects of the Polish-German tandem project devoted to stereotypical thinking

Der Einsatz von kurzen lustigen Videos im DaF-Unterricht. Möglichkeiten für die Wortschatz- und Grammatikarbeit

2020-01-30T08:55:30+00:00

Because emotions play a major role in the learning and memorising process, it is of high importance to create positive emotions in order to make language learning more efficient and enjoyable. The aim of this article is to show how a very popular source of entertainment, funny animal videos, can be used to make language learning more attractive to students. The author explores the connections between emotions – such as fun, joy and curiosity – and brain activity during learning. She then describes a range of exercises based on funny animal videos which can be used to introduce and practice vocabulary and grammar at different language levels and to create positive associations with the foreign language, in this case German

English language teachers’ conceptualizations of one-to-one private tutoring: An international phenomenographic study

2020-01-30T08:54:53+00:00

Private English tutoring, understood as the paid English teaching service offered to students to supplement their learning of English at school or prepare them for an examination in English, has become a popular out-of-school learning activity. In order to obtain deeper insights into its intricacies, the need arises to examine the experience of one of its pivotal stakeholders – the private tutors. This article is based on a phenomenographic study with a view to investigating the conceptions of private tutoring held by 15 English teachers from three countries (Poland, Portugal, and Turkey) who offer private teaching services in English in their local contexts. The findings suggest that there are at least three conceptions according to which private tutoring can be experienced by the participants: as a source of income, as helping, and as professional development. The study also poses the question if there is space for formal training of private tutors and calls for further research into English private tutoring