Calls for a stronger pedagogical connection between teaching the language of schooling and teaching foreign languages have repeatedly been made, as it is believed learners can benefit from the potential synergies. Despite this long-standing demand, however, language lessons continue to focus largely on a single language. The SWIKO triple S project is investigating whether interrelationships between the language of schooling and foreign languages can be capitalised on. The project is particularly interested in conceptual aspects of text, specifically “text procedures” and their transferability. Text procedures are text-type specific wording patterns that consist of a language-specific expression (e.g. “A looks like B”) and a cross-linguistic schema (e.g. comparisons) common to many languages (Marx/Steinhoff, 2021).
In the first project phase, text procedures are identified in learner texts compiled in the SWIKO corpus that were composed in German as the language of schooling and in the foreign languages taught (DaF, FLE and EFL); in addition, the extent to which text procedure use differs between learners of German as the language of schooling and learners of German as a foreign language is determined. It is expected that a smaller bandwidth of variation in text procedures will be found in L2 texts, which will instead contain only a few relatively simple procedures. It is also expected that learners will combine languages in some text procedures.
In the second phase, an interventional study at the lower secondary school level is conducted to investigate whether writing arrangements for text procedures have an interlingual value and whether greater awareness of text procedures in the language of schooling can effectively help learners produce texts both in the school language and in the foreign languages.
In the first project phase, the SWIKO corpus created at RCM will be further developed by creating new annotations at the text level (text procedures); this information will be made available for future research. In addition, it is expected that the project will generate findings on the following aspects: a) the text procedures used by lower secondary school students; b) the similarities and differences found in texts for German as the language of schooling and German as a foreign language; and c) the degree to which learners produce text procedures in foreign-language texts in more than one language.
The second phase addresses the long-standing calls for a better curricular link between teaching the language of schooling and foreign languages by developing and testing an interlingual pedagogical setting or writing argumentative texts that is designed to capitalise on the synergies between languages taught at school. Conceptual and empirical findings on the interlingual impact of the writing arrangements are expected.