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“People who learn German like shouting because that’s what Germans do”
9 January, 2018 at 4:15 pm - 5:15 pm
CeLM Seminar
“People who learn German like shouting because that’s what Germans do”
by Heike Krüsemann (University of Reading)
Date Tues 9th January 2018
Time 16h15 – 17h15
Venue Palmer G04
This paper is based on a mixed methods PhD project which explored how German is conceptualised and represented in UK school settings and the press, and investigated the relationship between discourses around German, learner motivation and uptake of German in UK secondary schools. The participants of the study were 13-15 year old German learners from a range of UK secondary schools who had all recently made a decision regarding their future German-learning, as well as German teachers and head teachers. Underpinned by a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, the research instruments (learner questionnaires and focus groups) were designed to probe students’ beliefs and attitudes through metaphor elicitation as well as more traditional Likert-type items. The learner data were coded into framing categories before the results were related to both German-continuers’ and German-droppers’ macro-context, such as their socio-economic background. Adolescent German-learners’ discourses around German were then compared those of teachers and head teachers (elicited through interviews), and with wider discourses currently in circulation. For this purpose, a specialised corpus of 40.000+ articles on German, the Germans and Germany from a range of UK national newspapers was compiled, and methods from the field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) employed for its analysis. Through its exploration of the relationship between public linguistic patterns around German, the Germans and Germany with those found in grassroots discourses by key players (learners and teachers) in school settings, the study links grassroots and societal attitudes towards German with questions about the future of German-learning in UK secondary schools.
Heike Krüsemann | Research Assistant and PhD Researcher | University of Reading, Institute of Education, London Road Campus, building L33 room 115, 4 Redlands Road, Reading, RG1 5EX | + 44(0) 118 378 2645 | h.kruesemann@reading.ac.uk | http://germanintheuk.com | https://twitter.com/HeikeKruesemann