Department of German

Linking Meaning and Form in Acquisition: Level IV, Text in Context

I. LANGUAGE  FOCUS 

Text in Context extends discursive behavior from the concrete into the abstract realm, focusing on the secondary discourses of public life, as contrasted with the primary discourses of familiarity and direct interaction that were at the heart of Levels I - III.

Cognitively, this shift requires the ability to make certain distancing moves, since experience is now objectified in order to place it into larger generalizable contexts. Classification, laws, cultural belief systems and expectations, and policies take on a particular role in writing tasks. In other words, signification is now no longer primarily direct but heavily metaphorical according to certain cultural norms.

Linguistically, this means that relations and structures are organized around the nominal paradigm and that lexicogrammatical features are increasingly foregrounded. The long-term development of a more academic mode of expression is begun here, thereby laying the foundation for all Level IV and V courses with their range of genres and respective characteristics.

While many of the issues that were central to Level III require continued attention, particularly as far as accuracy is concerned, the central instructional concern of Text and Context is this shift in the use of semiotic resources and a demand for greater complexity in order achieve greater information density. No longer separable into distinct layers, this complexity manifests itself as

• discourse-organizational and genre-appropriate complexity/variation
• syntactic complexity/variation, and as
• lexical complexity/variation, particularly topic-specific vocabulary (e.g., politics, history, business, literary theorizing),

where all three levels are interrelated in students' gradually restructured interlanguage in terms of a lexicogrammar that they learn to use strategically as a resource rather than merely replicating a formal inventory. Such restructuring has two prerequisites:

• (1) that students notice the gap between their own often surprisingly fluent (though not necessarily accurate or complex) performance and the sophisticated language use of a well argued text, particularly in a specialized area of expertise (e.g., politics, history, business and trade, economics, education); and
• (2) that instructors continue to evaluate students' language in light of those demands rather than simply accept it "getting things across in an understandable way."

In order to accomplish this, instructors need to think of their own classroom language as a model for complex language use, in spoken and written language. Textual modeling will be both implicit and explicit, involving attention-focusing activities, scaffolding, analysis of particular semantic, syntactic, and lexical features with a wide range of texts, and individual diagnosis, goal-setting and self-monitoring under different task conditions.

This requires

• repeated opportunities for meaning-driven choices in order to arrive at increases in accuracy and complexity that are communicatively appropriate;
• a wide range of texts, though within a thematic unit and within the course overall with a certain "slope" (e.g., from narrative to abstract, from private to public) and interrelated tasks;
• awareness of the characteristics of specialized language for particular discourse communities, e.g. literary language, the language of the business world, of education, of politics, of concerns in the social sphere.

II. Emphasis and Weighting of Features

• + Focused treatment by way of explicit teaching of the feature

Demonstration of the interrelationship between micro-, macro- and metatextual features for a given genre or text type, in terms of the meaning of a text and its subsequent interpretation. Ideally, every major writing task should refer to one or more models;
Appropriate shifts and variation between different modes of representation, personal narrative and abstract public discourse. This typically involves repeated work with the shift between the verbal and the nominal paradigm;
Differentiation between levels of importance of particular pieces of information or propositions, along with backgrounding and foregrounding features (e.g., main clause vs. subordinate clause, vs. phrase vs. nominal treatment of an idea);
Identification of author stance and intention through the organizational patterns, information flow of a text, and evaluative devices used;
Expanding the repertoire for creating cohesion and coherence, through use of a unifying metaphor, through use of major semantic fields, and also through the varied lexicon that characterizes them;
Expansion of thematic lexicon and high-frequency collocations, idioms, or fixed expressions that characterize themes, topics, and genres;
Incorporation of other sources and forms of evidence in order to bolster an argument;
Expansion of possibilities for modification, particularly in the noun phrase (e.g., explicit teaching of extended attributes, relative clauses, varied adjective formation);
Use of flavoring particles (ja, eben, doch) and a range of adverbs many of which indicate author stance or assessment of a situation, presumed knowledge, relationship between author and audience (e.g., allerdings, natürlich, selbstverständlich, unerwartet leider unglückerlicherweise; kaum, selten, wenig, wiederholt).

•  ++ Focused treatment in order to assure accuracy of previously taught material

Sentence level syntax, particularly in terms of word order in major complex sentence patterns, and local morphological features (e.g., adjectives, plurals, subject-verb agreement, prepositions and their case requirements);
Verbal paradigm in terms of tense and aspect relationships;
Passive constructions, relative clauses in diverse syntactic environments ;
Subjunctives vs. past tenses, passives;
Variation in sentence patterns.