Student Directed Speech (SDS). How Teachers Adapt Language in the Classroom Context
Final Report Abstract
The overall aim of the project is to describe the linguistic characteristics of the language addressed to students (Student directed Speech, SdS) from a linguistic perspective as accurately as possible. We therefore ask to what extent teachers adapt their language of instruction towards the linguistic level of development of their students within different grades. We assume the goal of language acquisition in school context lies within the competencies described as “konzeptionelle Schriftlichkeit”. In a narrower focus, we also ask to what extent teachers use supportive language acts in interaction with their students by offering them a kind of modellike feedback in direct contrast to their previous utterance. A corpus of a total of 32 videotaped lessons has been analyzed. The core idea of the study design is to keep the teacher constant in three secondary school levels in order to be able to observe linguistically adaptive language behavior. For each school year, a double lesson was video-documented with a total of four Science and four German teachers (two male/two female per subject). This allows a direct, intra-individual comparison of the linguistic behavior of the secondary school teachers. We obtained comparative data on the lower end of the school year spectrum from eight additionally videotaped primary school teachers who teach the subjects German or Science with a biological focus in year 3. With regard to input adaptation, the analyses show that the participating teachers increasingly develop their language in the direction of ”konzeptionelle Schriftlichkeit” up to upper secondary level – particularly in the morphologically and phrase-related categories, although this is hardly or never the case in the syntactical categories, e. g. subordinate clauses. A number of categories thus indicates a model function for teacher language, while certain others do not. In the area of supportive language acts, it can be shown that teachers tend to formulate positive feedback explicitly and negative feedback implicitly. Explicit feedback (positive/negative) specifically on linguistic features of students' utterances is only available in a marginal number of cases. Feedback on linguistic aspects is mainly given implicitly by the teachers. When comparing the different grades, it can be seen that forms which strongly repeat the student's utterance (expansions) dominate, especially in primary and lower grades, while more open options (reformulations and rephrasings) predominate in the higher grades.
Publications
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Die Rolle des sprachlichen Inputs im schulischen Spracherwerb. In: Der Deutschunterricht. H. 5. S. 58–68. ISSN: 0340-2258.
Kleinschmidt-Schinke, Katrin
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Sprache der Lehrer/-innen – Sprache der Schüler/-innen. In: Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung/Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften (Hrsg.): Die Sprache in den Schulen – Eine Sprache im Werden. Dritter Bericht zur Lage der deutschen Sprache. Bearb. v. Ursula Bredel und Helmuth Feilke. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. S. 63–90. ISBN: 978-3-503-20502-8.
Kleinschmidt-Schinke, Katrin
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Sprachliche Komplexität im medial mündlichen Unterrichtsdiskurs. In: Der Deutschunterricht. H. 1/2021. S. 44–53. ISSN: 0340-2258.
Kleinschmidt-Schinke, Katrin
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Wie Sprache Bildung macht und wie Bildung Sprache macht. Einblicke in den Unterrichtsdiskurs. In: Struger, Jürgen (Hrsg.): Sprache – Macht – Bildung. Berlin: Frank & Timme. S. 37–62. ISBN: 978-3-7329-0962-9.
Pohl, Thorsten
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Perspektiven bei der Erforschung authentischer Unterrichtskommunikation. Möglichkeiten – Grenzen – Schwerpunkte. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanistenverbandes, 71(1), 8-28.
Pohl, Thorsten & Kleinschmidt-Schinke, Katrin
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Syntaktische Komplexität im Unterrichtsdiskurs: Nominalphrasen im Jahrgangsstufenvergleich. Sprachsensibilität in Bildungsprozessen, 71-95. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.
Goschler, Juliana & Kleinschmidt-Schinke, Katrin
