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On the basis of an overview of articles in Info DaF in the 2010 s, this paper aims at tracing the development of research on the education and training of GFL teachers outside of Germany within this decade. It emphasizes the potential of international cooperation in facilitating progress in practice and research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates which formative assessment practices twelve German as a foreign language teachers in lower secondary school use for speaking and how they motivate them. Classroom observations and retrospective interviews revealed that teachers rarely give individual feedback on speaking performance because of time constraints, prefer implicit corrections such as recasts and try to encourage peer-feedback and self-corrections because the teachers consider them to be less demotivating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how students build narrative in collaborative reading processes using the picture book Wazn Teez? (Ellis 2017) to construct the narrative in collaborative reading processes. The focus is on their linguistic and school experiences as well as the differences in interaction in the construction of meaning. Students with Arabic, German and Russian as their first languages were examined in an exploratory study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the developmental phases of the digital TestDaF and shows how the new task types and the digital test administration strengthen the relationship to the context of higher education institutions in Germany and to the CEFR. The contribution deals extensively with the test construct, the test format, and the different types of tasks used in the reading, listening, writing, and speaking sections. Innovative approaches and methods of performance assessment and scoring are discussed as much as their practical implementation. Finally, the paper presents some perspectives of future studies on the digital TestDaF and elaborates on relations to contemporary language testing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the role of listening comprehension in foreign language teaching, this paper illustrates the importance of phonological competence in general and prosody in particular in facilitating the auditory decoding process. Subsequently, the new phonological control scale in the companion volume of the CEFR is presented, which, in contrast to the previous scale, also emphasises the suprasegmental aspects of language. These are crucial in the receptive phase to break down the flow of language into smaller units of meaning, which are easier to process in short-term memory and thus support the decoding process. Finally, micro listening exercises are shown, created with authentic material and designed to promote receptive prosodic competence in German as a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing migration and mobility, German at the workplace has become an important topic in the field of German as a foreign Language/German as a second language. Vocational language skills can be measured with the help of various tests for the profession. The Goethe-Test PRO: German for professionals (GTP) is one of those tests that provides evidence of vocational language skills. This article first deals with the vocational orientation, the test format and the adaptive test procedure of the GTP. The second part of this paper is devoted to the description of its psychometric quality. Finally, the results are discussed with regard to the relevance of vocational tests for German as a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a competency- and needs-based approach to exam preparation. The influence of test objectives, format and task types on the creation of teaching materials is shown on the basis of the digital TestDaF. For this purpose, learning materials are described that are geared towards the development and training of communicative competencies. The aim is to go beyond pure format training in exam preparation and thus achieve positive washback effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Der Beitrag beschreibt den Prozess der Umstellung eines Deutschprogramms an einer japanischen Universität auf ein konsequent aufgabenbasiertes Curriculum. Es werden die Erfahrungen, Probleme und Ergebnisse dieser Veränderungen aus der Sicht der beteiligten Lehrenden dargestellt. Im Anschluss an einen kurzen Überblick zur Situation des Deutschunterrichts in Japan werden zunächst die Gründe für die Entwicklung des neuen Programmes aufgezeigt sowie die theoretischen Überlegungen, die ihnen zugrunde lagen. Im Zentrum des Beitrags stehen die im Verlauf von vier Jahren zutage getretenen und zu bewältigenden Konflikte sowie das gemeinsame Ringen der Lehrenden um Lösungen. Die Darstellung schließt mit einem Blick auf bisher erreichte Ergebnisse. In this paper we describe the implementation of a strictly task-based curriculum in a German language program at a Japanese university, illustrating the experiences, challenges and results from the point of view of the teachers involved. After a brief overview of the situation of teaching German at Japanese universities in general we explain the reasons leading to the development of the new program as well as the underlying theoretical considerations. The focus of this article is on the conflicts, which emerged over the course of the four years since the implementation of the task-based curriculum, and the combined efforts of the teaching staff to find solutions. Finally, we present an overview of the achievements to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various books on the topic of German as a foreign language for the workplace. The anthology "Der Betrieb als Sprachlernort" by Sander and Efing examines the significance of the workplace as a place for language learning. The monograph "Deutsch für den Beruf. Eine Einführung" by Niederhaus is a standard work in the field of professional and subject-specific German instruction. Another book covers various chapters on reading, writing, speaking, and listening in a professional context, as well as methodological and didactic approaches for language instruction. All of these books contribute to the enrichment of the field of German for the workplace. [Extracted from the article]

This paper deals with the problem of grammatical innovation in general, with special focus on the German language in particular. The main interest is concentrated on the grammaticalization phases of the syntactic variants of epistemic modality in German. The theoretical background is offered by Markedness Theory within the broader frame of Naturalness Theory (NT). The main postulates are derived from the proposition of NT (Mayerthaler, Dressler, Wurzel et al.), which claims that grammatical/language variants that are more natural are less marked and consequently are developed later in the process of language evolution than less marked and consequently more natural grammatical/ structural variants. The latter become productive earlier within the innovation processes of languages. According to the Slovene Model of Natural Syntax, it is claimed that the Markedness Level of the Microgrammatical Context of the observed grammatical categories or structures shows systematic sensitivity in correlation with the functional complexity of the structure involved and/or the phase of grammaticalization: Higher functional complexity and/or earlier stage or phase of grammaticalization shows a positive correlation with higher markedness degrees of the microgrammatical context of constructions. As concrete examples of the above-mentioned theoretical postulate, we present the syntactic variants for epistemic modality in German (expressed by modal verbs, by würde-constructions, and by werden+infinitive constructions). Each of the observed syntactic variants forms a separate sample. All samples are compared on the basis of analyses of the Microgrammatical Context with which they collocate (person, number, tense, voice, transitivity etc.). Statistical analyses of the linguistic data confirm that there is a clearly marked interdependence between functional complexity, age of the constructions, and the markedness of their microgrammatical contexts. Interstructural relations and the direction of further innovative development in a certain categorical spectrum can be derived from the obtained data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2006 Matthew White, an American blogger who called Wikipedia „the McDonald's of information", closed down his Wikipedia-critical blog, stating that as everyone knew about the bad quality of Wikipedia, his job was done. In this paper three Wikipedia authors recount the struggle of the German Wikipedia community to improve the quality of the articles in the German language. They discuss how the community reacted to the growing media pressure and how it repeatedly developed new strategies and concepts for quality management. The investigation suggests that while some parts of the German Wikipedia are still comparable to fast food, others are already on their way to haute cuisine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to the two regular plural markers -en and -e for strong and weak inflection (Banken, Jahr-e) with their morphonological variants -n and -0 (Ranke-n, Fahrer-0) German has employed plurals with umlaut (Wölf-e, Väter-0) and in -er (Hühn-er) since Early New High German and, more recently, plurals in -s which establish a new plural class in German (Uhus, Müllers, Hochs und Tiefs). This formation of a new plural class, however, severely contradicts the assumptions of Markedness Theory, according to which language change should lead to a decline in markedness, to a reduction of the diversity of forms, but not to the formation of an additional class. The paper will show that development and function of the umlaut plural and the -er plural can be explained as substitutions for the -e plural subjected to apocope in Early New High German and as better realizations of the naturalness principle of uniqueness, whereas the -s plural can be accounted for in terms of transparency requirements which, in some word classes, dominate all other naturalness principles including those of optimal word length and implicational paradigm structure. Since the specific word classes that form an -s plural in German share joint features, I will assume a specific 'transparency domain' for these nouns. On the one hand, the phonologically or semiotically special characteristics of these nouns motivate the emergence of a new plural class, on the other hand, they define relatively clear cut boundaries. The motivation for the different plural forms, their development and even their decline will be explained in the framework of Markedness Theory by competing naturalness principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes coordinate concessive constructions in German. The data are drawn from a large corpus of written contemporary texts. Purely concessive connectives such as trotzdem, dennoch or gleichwohl 'nevertheless' are distinguished from connectives having a general adversative meaning (e.g. aber "but") or a primarily temporal meaning (e.g. rtach alledem 'after all'). These connectives will be analyzed with respect to their etymology, their grammaticalization and their frequency in different types of texts. Coordinate constructions can be viewed as non-prototypical, but indispensable, means of expressing concessivity. In fact, coordinate connectives can fulfil a variety of functions. Not only are they used as connecting devices for two main clauses, but they also appear in subordinate constructions: here, they have the following functions: they serve to reinforce the contents of a subordinate clause which already contains a concessive subjunction (e.g. obwohl ... dennoch 'although ... nevertheless'), make explicit the concessive meaning of a clause which otherwise has no concessive meaning (und ... dennoch 'and ... nevertheless'), or even serve as a concessive subjunction themselves (trotzdem 'although'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]