“You Are Virtually Submerged in a Sea of Language, of Words, and the Brain Takes on a Life of Its Own”

A Seminar on Higher Education Didactics to Introduce Competence-oriented Linguistic Analysis of Learner Generated Texts

Abstract

Before teachers can begin with the linguistic support of a learner, it is indispensable to precisely determine possible linguistic potentials as well as support needs of the respective learners within the framework of a diagnosis. In the further education programme Deutsch als Zweitsprache intensiv at the University of Cologne, which is part of the NRW-wide further education initiative Deutsch als Zweitsprache, a lot of emphasis is therefore placed on intensive training of the (prospective) teachers’ linguistic diagnostic skills. In this context, the competence-oriented linguistic analysis of learner-generated texts (KLLA; vgl. Veiga-Pfeifer et al., 2020) can be used as a versatile language diagnostic procedure. Authentic texts of language learners are analysed on the basis of different language levels. However, it is essential that the teacher has a basic knowledge of linguistics and that the analysis is resource-oriented and not deficit-oriented. In order for the KLLA to be adequately implemented by the (prospective) teachers, a systematic introduction to the method takes place in the above-mentioned further education programme. This article first discusses the theoretical background of the KLLA as well as the procedure itself and the methodological-didactic positioning of the university didactic concept. Building on this, it then provides a detailed insight into the didactic concept of higher education, followed by a presentation of evaluation results and reports on the experiences of trained participants and a brief outlook.