Language for Teaching Purposes by Emma Riordan

Author:Emma Riordan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Second, teachers may employ less complex grammar where, for example, shorter, less complicated utterances are favoured. One way of considering the complexity of sentence structure in German may be to examine the use of subordinating conjunctions. These are conjunctions which change the structure of the subordinated clause from the familiar (at least to the English speaker) subject–verb–object construction to place the verb at the end of the clause. Indeed, it may be the German subordinating conjunction that impelled Twain to propose a reformation of the German language whereby “this important part of speech [the verb] should be brought forward to a position where it may be easily seen with the naked eye” (Twain, 1880). The data from my study suggests that teachers avoid more complicated sentence structures when speaking in class.

Only five conjunctions were found in the 100 most frequently used German words in the class transcripts. These are shown in Table 4.3. As may be expected, UND is the most frequently used conjunction, followed by ODER. These, along with ABER, are coordinating conjunctions which join two main clauses and therefore do not have any effect on sentence structure. Only two of the conjunctions on this list are subordinating conjunctions (WENN and DASS), indicating a lack of complexity in teachers’ speech and a tendency towards main clause sentences.Table 4.3Most frequently occurring conjunctions in teachers’ classroom talk data (top 100 words)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.