Volume 2024, Issue 81

This article examines perceptions of and attitudes towards the use of non-German languages in Austrian schools from the perspective of students and teachers. By differentiating between teachers, students with exclusively German L1 and students with a non-German L1, different perspectives on code-switching in group work situations are examined. For this purpose, data was collected via online questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions between students. The results show that switching to another language in group work settings is perceived as inappropriate, in particular by those students who have no competence in a language other than German. Moreover, they associate switching with poorer performance in class and interpret the use of a language other than German in class to be antagonistic or talking behind the back of people who do not speak that language (“gossiping”). In contrast, – and contrary to the assumption that they evaluate language switches in the classroom more negatively due to stricter normative views – teachers show a consistently more positive perception of code switching behaviour and its multilingual speakers. It can be concluded from the findings that multilingualism in the school context and its overall benefits should not only be addressed in teacher training, but that it would also be useful to raise students’ awareness of multilingual practices.

According to coaching literature, coaches’ questions serve as a central intervention to support clients’ learning and development, i. e., solution-generation and change. To date, there is very little empirical research regarding coaching-specific questions and how they function as agents of change in this professional helping format. The few available psychological coaching outcome studies address ‘solution-focused questions’ due to its (theoretical) endemic orientation towards identifying solutions. Linguistic research, drawing on (methods of) Conversation Analysis, has only recently started to address coaching as a field of scientific inquiry. This paper builds on the scant available research and focusses on questions that support solution generation as the ‘target actions’ of question sequences. These question types are sequence-initiating actions that are intended to generate ideal solution projections and to help identify client’s resources or hindrances; they also focus on solution strategies and measures to find solutions as well as the interim results within the client’s change process. The goal of this contribution is to document and analyze the formal, functional, thematic, and semantic features of questions that generate solutions in business coaching and – on this basis of this analysis – to describe their interaction- and question-type specificities, something which has hitherto not been done. The data analysed here are 12 audio-/video-recorded and transcribed sessions from three authentic coaching processes that form part of a larger corpus of systemic solution-oriented business coaching in German.

Resistance in the ‚Third Reich‘ was a mostly solitary and thus lonely struggle not only against the National Socialist regime, but also for being heard by the silent majority society. In addition to the various communicative practices of warning, admonishing, or calls to action, argumentation also played an important role. The task was not only to convince members of the majority society of the righteousness of their resistance goals and perspectives, but also to agree on goals and perspectives within the various resistance groups and in the exchange between these groups. This dual role of argumentation as a practice that is constitutive of both the group as well as the group’s identity makes this communicative practice an important phenomenon in capturing communicative conditions, circumstances, and paradigms of resistance to National Socialism. In this paper, these functional contexts are examined and the way in which arguments were used both to persuade members of the integrated society and to negotiate consensual principles and goals within resistance groups are discussed.

This article sheds light on the functionality of dialect performance in digital writing on Instagram. Within an interactional-sociolinguistic framework, two Instagram posts (by aroundtheword ; responsible: ZDF) which deal with the German-speaking dialect area including follow-up communication (1,068 comments) are analysed. The main research questions guiding this article are (1) for what specific purpose dialect is used in the analysed Instagram comments and (2) which functional patterns of dialect use can be identified in this form of digital interaction. The corpus study presented follows a mixed methods approach and thus integrates descriptive quantitative and qualitative analyses. In theoretical and methodological terms, the study is based on widely accepted models of stance research (Du Bois 2007) as well as media and internet linguistic concepts (Beißwenger 2020). From this theoretical perspective, Instagram communication is investigated as a (typical) format of a digital and interaction-orientated stance practice. The present study provides insights into the stance potential of dialect performance: it not only serves as a marker of authenticity and a resource for identity construction (referring to regionality) but is also an essential means of community building (as part of alignment) and epistemic-evidential positioning.

More than ever before, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance and challenges of high-quality science communication. In various phases of the pandemic, the public voiced discontent about the way scientific results were communicated. This article is anchored in the field of media linguistic reception research. Its aim is less to shed light on the quality of science communication itself than to pursue the question which methods in reception research are most suitable for illuminating how recipients perceived the pandemic. To this end, we compare the results of a survey with the analysis of comments from the comment sections of four YouTube videos. The results imply that, for this specific case, the analysis of social media comments is more suitable as an addition to the survey rather than constituting an alternative because surveys can elicit targeted responses whereas comment sections contain a whole spectrum of topics addressed. The study also comes to the conclusion that, in addition to target-group-oriented, comprehensible communication, it is above all important to raise awareness for the kind of processes that shape an academic’s work.

An essential prerequisite for a fully developed writing ability is the effortless mastery of lower-level writing skills. These include, in particular, writing fluency, since fluent writing frees up sufficient cognitive capacity for other demanding higher-order processes of text production, such as planning and revising a text or tailoring it to a particular audience. Despite its relevance, writing fluency – in contrast to reading fluency – has so far only played a minor role in both writing research and classroom practice. This article first defines the construct of writing fluency and then elaborates on its two components: transcription fluency and text generation fluency. While transcription fluency is fairly well defined in the existing literature, text generation fluency remains underspecified, particularly from a linguistic point of view. How ideas are fluently translated into language is not sufficiently addressed by cognitive models of writing processes. It remains unclear which linguistic knowledge is most relevant for writing processes; what is known is that part of it is knowledge of genre-specific text patterns. Within the framework of an explorative empirical study, the influence of different text genres on the text generation fluency of primary school students was investigated to shed more light on this component. We found that text genre has an influence on text generation fluency, in particular in more competent writers, whereas there appears to be no such influence in weaker writers. The latter can be explained by the fact that in texts of weaker writers, the content appears to have been written more associatively and that there are hardly any genre-specific patterns and linguistic elements irrespective of the text genre they were asked to produce.