Teaching comma placement in German in secondary schools and universities

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Iris Rautenberg; Dr. Stefan Wahl
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495357321

In Germany, many pupils struggle immensely when it comes to orthography. The most common errors that occur until secondary school and beyond are errors related to commas, particularly clause-final commas. Traditionally, lessons on clause-final commas at the beginning of secondary education focus on conjunctions as signal words and the classification of main and subordinate clauses; an approach, which has repeatedly been criticized for contributing to the learners’ difficulties (Bredel et al, 2011). As an alternative, verb-based approaches have been developed, according to which utterances are always separated by a comma at a sentence boundary regardless of the existence of conjunctions and regardless of the type and position of subordinate clauses (Primus, 2010). The verb-based didactic models by Lindauer and Sutter (2005) as well as Bredel and Hlebec (2015) connect the necessity of a comma to the existence of a verbal head. In doing so, the simple and clear structure of the clause-final comma is assumed to become transparent to learners. The goal is for pupils to recognize finite verbs and their arguments as utterances that require a comma. Subordinating conjunctions and the classification of subordinate clauses are not addressed. These models have proved to be applicable and practical in secondary education. However, there are no representative empirical studies exploring the effectiveness of verb-based models in contrast to traditional approaches. The proposed project therefore aims at conducting a pre-post-follow-up intervention study that investigates the effectiveness of teaching clause-final commas via a verb-based approach compared to a conventional signal-word strategy. In this context, groups of fifth and eighth grade pupils as well as university students are instructed in online courses designed for this purpose.The first phase of the project consists of two preparatory steps: (a) the methodological and didactical design as well as technical implementation of the online courses and (b) the development of test methods suitable for measuring the test persons’ productive knowledge of comma usage (clause-final comma). The results of the intervention study will be considered in the development of an online tutorial for practical application in secondary and university education.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants