2. Grammar & psychology

Communicative tasks are helpful when learning the grammatical idiosyncrasies of the German language. This notion is being tested by a project undertaken by Wilfried Krenn and Manfred Schifko from the university preparation programme of the Universities of Graz in Austria.

Ingredients:

* Language learners whose native language exhibits a substantial structural difference with the target language (in this case: no difference between definite and indefinite articles, which is fundamental to German).
* Relevant grammar tasks (CRT-Consciousness Raising Tasks) with which these structural characteristics may not all be learnt at once, but at least allow the learner to recognise these features independently.

Preparation:

Introduce tasks to encourage language learning (these involve communication tasks, in which a grammatical problem is solved interactively in groups) as an alternative to the traditional teacher-focussed approach of presenting students with grammatical rules.

Such grammatical tasks make the learner aware of specific structural elements of the grammar (in the present case, articles in German), as a result enabling the learner to “perceive” them on his/her own. They may be seen as a preliminary stage in the acquisition of this grammatical skill.

In this case, roughly 50% of the test subjects found that the German article system was made more accessible than had been the case in compared groups without the special grammatical tasks.

Would you like to know more?

Click here (1.5 MB!) for a more detailed description of the project!
You can contact the project managers at manfred.schifko@uni-graz.at and at wilfried.krenn@kfunigraz.ac.at.