Volume 2019, Issue 70

This article presents polito-linguistics as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics. Its development from a rather morally and politically motivated, prescriptive linguistic critique to a methodologically-committed linguistics could make it seem predestined not only to analyse the use of right-wing language, but also to conduct a conversation with right-wing people. Furthermore, it is argued that such a conversation should not be overburdened with the hope that it could convince supporters of right-wing or even right-wing extremist ideologies of the dangers of their thinking and acting and thereby win them over to basic democratic convictions. Rather, it can at best be a matter of using “trialogical communication” to draw the attention of possible sympathisers and followers to the dangerous consequences of numerous right-wing and right-wing populist demands. By means of examples it is shown that these demands are made based on a limited number of recurring linguistic patterns. A polito-linguistically oriented applied linguistics that draws attention to such patterns and analyses the intentions pursued with these patterns could contribute to a society that feels committed to the model of a civil society founded on democratic values.

In current debates the media, policy makers and scientists are aiming to identify factors explaining negative trends in the orthography competencies of German primary school students. Especially a concept making use of initial sound tables and the method “reading by writing“ is often identified as a core factor. However empirical studies backing these claims are rare and contradictory. Also very little is known about the actual use of initial sound tables in primary schools. In this article we provide an overview of empirical studies on the effectiveness of the use of initial sound tables and the concept “reading by writing“. We then present data from a short teacher survey on the use of initial sound tables in German classes, which was realized as an extension to the PIRLS 2016 and is therefore representative for German primary schools. According to this survey about 70 % of all Grade 4 learners of 2016 have been exposed to initial sound tables as part of their German lessons throughout primary school. About half of these learners were asked to work almost every lesson with these tables in their first one-half years of schooling. We also find that teachers who work with sound tables differ in their beliefs about when student’s spelling mistakes should be corrected. In addition we find that the majority of teachers report to combine the use of sound tables with other materials, such as basic readers. We argue especially this finding should guide future designs of studies aiming to compare the effectiveness of different methods as most of the current studies possibly wrongly assume a distinctive or at least dominant use of initial sound tables or basic readers.

Rulebooks of Easy-to-read (ETR) German recommend to strictly avoid the genitive and to replace it by “von”-phrases with dative. This is backed by the assumption that for the target groups of ETR German genitive-phrases are generally harder to understand than “von”-phrases. However, there has been no empirical foundation for this assumption. The test reported in this paper addressed this problem and wanted to find out whether genitive is really harder to understand than “von”-phrases for two target groups: 17 adults with intellectual disability and 16 functional illiterates, that is people, who learned to read but, due to multiple reasons, do not have reading skills (anymore) that are sufficient for everyday life. The test was designed as multiple-choice test and compares the intelligibility of common forms of the attributive genitive (i.a. genitivus obiectivus, genitivus partitivus) with their “von”-paraphrases. The participants had to read and understand sentences and subsequently choose between statements that applied to the sentences or not. The overall results show that the tested forms of the attributive genitive were easy to understand. Comparing genitive-phrases and “von”-phrases there were no significant differences. That means, both forms were easy to understand for the participants. Some genitive forms were even easier to understand than the “von”-paraphrases. The results lead to the conclusion that the general prohibition of genitive in ETR German has to be revised.

The class council is a teaching format which takes place regularly, aiming at the teacher stepping back from his/her conventional role as the organizing authority in order to allow the students to participate directly in decision-making processes concerning their everyday school life. This format results in a unique interactional constellation among the participants. In this article, we explore this interactional constellation from the perspective of conversation and interaction analysis. On the basis of videographies of class council sessions in which students and teachers occupy different participation roles, we ask how those roles are negotiated interactively. With a specific focus on the teacher and the moderator (student), we ask to what extent the teacher is able to delegate leadership responsibility among the group. It is shown that teachers are only partly able to do so. Often, teachers influence the interaction on a multimodal level. The challenge of organizing the class council lies in the need for the participants to accomplish different (and in part incompatible) interactional orders: on the one hand, teachers as well as students have to consider their specific participation roles; on the other hand, their participation roles are framed institutionally and cannot easily be changed.

This article deals with new locative and multimodial media formats, which yield aspects of city histories, re-evaluating their cultural and also their touristic image. The analysis explores the shift from written city guides and building inscriptions to multimodal products (websites, apps) by focussing on two central techniques: the various forms of adressing and the linguistic description for localization, specifically local deicitica. Analogical to the “recipient design” as a basic concept of conversation analysis, the term “spacial design” is chosen to describe the linguistic means, which adjust the multimodal text to the artifacts of urban space, so that a interpretative historic formation will attach to the spacial environment and change the city view. One result of the analysis was the discovery of a mixture of personal and impersonal types of adressing, which shows, that personal adressing joins methods of multiple adressing in multimodal urban communication. The analysis also suggests, that localization practices get diversificated. The new communication products show multiple (“overdetermines”) deictica and phoric anchorages in the urban space, i. e. the deixis is overdetermined as perceptual and imagination-oriented, furthermore deictica are also connected with text elements (by phoric relations). As a discourse grammatical result, the emerged patterns construct an image of nearly automatical unevitaly and depersonalized urban development (e. g. road construction). This impression results from accounts of passive constructions related with instrumental sub-clauses.

The presented paper is about the evaluation of products in digital styling formats, such as tutorials, hauls and tops&flops. Therein, we provide an approach to analyze specific para-interactive processes specifically addressing a teenage audience. Semiotic as well as interactional approaches are considered to demonstrate, based on video material, how YouTube influencers use multimodal potentials of various text types para-interactively to integrate their (female) recipients into the video itself. This phenomenon leads to the fact, that the audience may not only share the perception of presented products, but also, the influencers’ evaluation.