Deutsch nach Englisch: Didaktische Brücken für syntaktische Klammern
Heinz L. Kretzenbacher
The University of Melbourne, Australia
Summary in English
Worldwide, German as a foreign language is learnt after English (GaE) in the majority of cases; typically as a third or further language; by native speakers of English sometimes as a second language. Transfer from English to the learner’s German interlanguage is frequent due to the close genetic relation between both languages, and often positive. However, there are instances where English patterns are hindering rather than fostering the acquisition of German structures, such as German morphosyntax. Seen from the viewpoint of English, German is in danger of being stereotypically perceived as a “difficult” language with a complex syntax and a plethora of cumbersome morphological structures such as inflectional suffixes. Mark Twain’s witty remarks about the “awful German language” are a testimony to that stereotypical perception, gently mocking the German language and at the same time the naïve approach to it by English speakers.
Both in its rigid SVO sentence structure and in its complete equation of grammatical gender with sex, English is not only different from German, but actually the „odd one out” among all Germanic languages. So in the case of GaE, the problem and a possible way of overcoming it does not so much lay with German, but with English as a base from which German is learnt. A simple and memory friendly didactic method can make learners of GaE aware of the differences and help them to develop the respective German structures in their interlanguages. With the visual help of a bridge, the syntactic bracket structures of German main and subordinate clauses can be demonstrated. The part grammatical gender plays for noun brackets in German can also be illustrated by the bridge model, thus providing an explanation for the existence of grammatical gender in German to learners of GaE and motivating them to learn the gender together with each German noun, understanding it as a tool to organize syntactic and textual structures. Thus the advances linguistic theory has made in the last decades in analyzing the fundamental bracketing structures underlying much of German morphosyntax can be applied in form of a didactic tool facilitating the learning of German, particularly of GaE.