Prescriptivism and sociolinguistic competence in German as a foreign language.

To Belgian students who study German language and literature at university, German is a foreign language (GFL). Hence, language errors are often defined in relation to learning the standard language as the norm. From an academic point of view, a distinction can be made between a linguistic and a sociolinguistic norm. While the linguistic norm refers to the language system in terms of grammar rules and the standard lexicon, sociolinguistics is concerned with language behaviour and language varieties in formal and informal settings. From the latter perspective, language errors are defined in terms of inappropriate language behaviour. The question is, how is such a sociolinguistic norm perceived by university students in a GFL context? In order to investigate this question, 31 bachelor and 14 master students majoring in German from both the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel were asked (in 2009-2010) to write down their point of view in narratives. The starting point of their discussions is the column on popular language use in SPIEGEL ONLINE (www.spiegel.de/thema/zwiebelfisch/) by the language critic and stand-up comedian Bastian Sick. The results indicate that foreign language students still have a rather prescriptive view on grammar and language learning. It is therefore suggested that in foreign language pedagogy, language errors are no longer solely understood as a function of grammatical accuracy but also from a sociolinguistic point of view as appropriateness.

ISBN:978-1-78309-650-3

Jaar van publicatie:2016

Trefwoorden:German as a Foreign Language