Aufsätze
Whereas issues and practices in inservice teacher development and training for second language teachers (INSET) have received growing attention in Anglo-American, Australian and Scandinavian contexts, they have remained a side issue in the professional discourse in Germany. This article provides a summary of recent discussions on INSET and elaborates on theoretical concepts underlying current attempts to redesign its practice. Focusing on concepts of experiential learning, professional development through action research, narrative approaches, subjective theories, and transfer theories, the authors delineate a set of critical tasks which need to be included in further efforts to reconceptualize INSET and to conduct appropriate research in this important field.
The article begins with an overview of the current role of the teaching of pronunciation in research and practice. Section 2 deals with “Pronunciation and Communicative Competence”, in particular the role of pronunciation in successful communication, the objective “pronunciation” as part of the overall learning aim “communicative competence”, and the necessity of specialised pronunciation training within a communicatively-oriented foreign language classroom. Section 3 outlines the influence of the variable “age” on pronunciation. Section 4 examines in detail the relationship between perception and pronunciation acquisition, and in Section 5 the importance of psycho-social and motivational factors for pronunciation is discussed. Section 6 summarises the issues raised so far. The following section briefly looks at the empirical findings on the efficiency of the teaching of pronunciation. In Section 8 some consequences for the methodology of pronunciation training are discussed. The article concludes by providing some recommendations for the teaching of pronunciation in the light of current trends in foreign language methodology (focus on form, learner autonomy).
This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the methods of data collection that have been used in interlanguage pragmatics to date. The different procedures are categorized according to modality of language use and the degree of control they exert on the data. Their suitability to examine different aspects of interlanguage pragmatics is assessed, and results from studies comparing different methods are reported. Finally, the paper briefly considers three research approaches (as opposed to specific methods) to interlanguage pragmatics research.