Teachers as Language Norm Authorities

This is a collaborative project between Prof. Wini Davies, Aberystwyth University, Dr Melanie Wagner, Université du Luxembourg and Prof. Eva L. Wyss, Universität Kobelnz-Landau. The role of teachers as the transmitters of prestige varieties of language tends to be taken for granted. It is assumed that they play a major role in cultivating and promoting the use of certain varieties / variants (standard German) and for that reason, they are usually described in the relevant literature as language norm authorities (Sprachnormautoritäten, cf. Ammon 1995). There are however few empirical studies to back up these assumptions. The demands made of teachers have changed substantially over the years as schools have become increasingly socially and linguistically heterogeneous, and more changes may come their way in the wake of the post-PISA debate in the German-speaking countries about strengths and weaknesses of the various national education systems. For academic linguists the dominant model used to describe the linguistic situation in the German-speaking world is ‘pluricentricity’, i.e. one German language made up of a number of equally valid national varieties. In this project we aim to establish to what extent such a model is useful for teachers, as well as establishing what linguistic competences teachers consider important nowadays.

References:
Ammon, Ulrich (1995): Die deutsche Sprache in Deutschland, Oesterreich und der Schweiz: Das Problem der nationalen Varietaeten. Berlin/New York.

Publications:

Davies, Winifred, Melanie Wagner & Eva Wyss (2014): Deutsch im gymnasialen Unterricht: Deutschland, Luxemburg und die deutschsprachige Schweiz im Vergleich.In: Sprachreport 2/2014, pp. 2-9.

Wyss, Eva, Winifred Davies & Melanie Wagner (2017): Deutschlehrerinnen und Deutschlehrer zwischen curricularen Vorgaben, Sprachsituation und Sprachwissen. In: Drumbl, H., G de Carvalho & J Klinner (eds): Internationale Deutschlehrertagung 2013. Konferenzbeiträge. Bd 8 : Sprachenpolitik und Sprachenvielfalt. Bozen-Bolzano University Press, pp. 169-182.

(in press, to appear 2017) Davies, Winifred V., Annelies Häcki Buhofer, Regula Schmidlin, Melanie Wagner & Eva Wyss (eds.), Standardsprache zwischen Norm und Praxis. Theoretische Betrachtungen, empirische Studien und sprachdidaktische Ausblicke (= Basler Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur, Bd. 99), Tübingen: Francke.