Volume 2022, Issue 76

In a growing number of schools, class councils are a regularly practiced interactional format to support pupils’ participation in decision making processes as well as the development of social competence. Whether class councils should also be used to resolve social conflicts, however, is controversial. While the class council is viewed as a suitable opportunity to discuss the pupils’ diverging views in many studies, others are highly critical of this idea, citing the potential effects of conflicting requirements. In this article, we take a conversation analytical approach to how the rhetorical practices and social competence of 9- to 15-year-old pupils and the teacher involvement affect the ways in which conflicts are resolved. Focusing on practices of addressing and social positioning, we analyse how the complex requirements of collective conflict resolution are interactionally dealt with during class councils. Our analysis shows that, on a structural level, the participants are confronted with three facets of processing and resolving social conflicts: reconstruction, resolution and organization. Against the backdrop of these core categories, we propose several practical considerations aimed at increasing teachers’ awareness of the interactional requirements of collaborative conflict resolution.

In the German-speaking world, communication within institutions, in particular universities, is generally expected to be conducted in Standard German. This paper investigates whether this notion aligns with the perceptions and attitudes of lecturers at Viennese universities and children’s universities. The five major Viennese universities were, due to their broad catchment area resulting in a diverse (in terms of both geographic origin and linguistic background) teaching staff and student body, chosen for participant recruitment. The research question is addressed by empirically examining lecturers’ self-assessment of their usage of standard and regional varieties of German in the two different contexts of teaching, i. e. at universities and children’s universities, using an online questionnaire. The findings show that intra-individual variation is used by lecturers as a functional resource to create specific contexts and meanings during teaching. Across the whole investigation, teachers in the middle and oldest age groups perceived their use of language variation as more consistent than the younger group. Results indicate that the way lecturers speak at university significantly affects how they speak at children’s university. In conclusion, regarding different situational constellations and activities, a clear context-specific use of the whole variational spectrum can be observed.

Since spring 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has presented an international challenge that requires expert knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines. From the very beginning, virological expertise was particularly in demand in order to advise politicians and to inform the population about the virus, its multiplication rate and its spread as well as typical symptoms of an infection. Virological expertise has been mediated through institutions that specialize in science communication and science journalism (e. g. the Science Media Center Germany in Cologne) and to a large extent through mass media. Against this backdrop, this article explores the demarcation practices of virologists in political talk shows. Our corpus consists of 25 political talk shows which were broadcast on publicly available channels in Germany between March 2020 and April 2021. The article addresses the tensions between the domains of science, politics, and media and demonstrates how virologists try to maintain and defend the borders between these domains. On the basis of interactional linguistics, we analyse the pointing practices of three virologists (Melanie Brinkmann, Alexander Kekulé and Hendrik Streeck) to identify crucial demarcation practices employed.

In the last years, gender-sensitive language use has become an important issue of public debate in Germany and many other countries. The generic use of masculine forms in particular has been widely criticised. How, for example, public figures and politicians, both in government and of the opposition, refer to groups comprised of diverse genders is therefore scrutinised by the general public and routinely commented on in the media. In this paper, we analyse the language use of candidates for German chancellor and federal state prime minister, respectively, in televised pre-election debates – i. e. the most important single campaign event – from 1997 to 2020. Focussing on references to voters ( Wählerinnen [FEM] or Wähler [MASC]) and to citizens ( Bürgerinnen [FEM] or Bürger [MASC]), we quantitatively investigate the following research questions: Has the use of gender-sensitive expressions increased over the years? Are female candidates more likely to use gender-sensitive language than male candidates? Is there a preference for gender-sensitive language (as opposed to using the generic masculine) among candidates on the left of the political spectrum compared to conservative candidates?