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Band 49 · Heft 1 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0) 7071 97 97 0 info@narr.de \ www.narr.de \ narr.digital Author Guidelines All submissions undergo double-blind peer review. To prepare your submissions please refer to the AAA style sheet available at https: / / elibrary.narr.digital/ journal/ aaa Please submit your contributions to: AAA-editors@narr.de To enquire about publishing a special issue please contact: AAA-editors@narr.de. For subscription information please contact: abo@narr.de. Editors / Herausgeber: innen Alexander Onysko, Ulla Ratheiser, Werner Delanoy Editorial Assistant / Redaktion Eva Triebl Editorial board (alphabetical) / Mitherausgeber: innen (alphabetisch): Sibylle Baumbach Marcus Callies Marta Degani Alwin Fill Walter Grünzweig Sarah Herbe Walter Hölbling Julia Hüttner Allan James Cornelia Klecker Ursula Kluwick Benjamin Kremmel Andreas Mahler Christian Mair Georg Marko Frauke Matz Simone Pfenninger Peter Siemund Ute Smit Laurenz Volkmann Max von Blanckenburg Werner Wolf Libe García Zarranz Founding editor / Erstherausgeber Bernhard Kettemann Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 1 Table of Contents Articles Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model of the variety of English taught in German secondary schools Elen Le Foll .............................................................................................................. 3 Text types in the Austrian Standardized National School-Leaving Exam for English: An empirical study into the perception of the text type constructs by teachers Günther Sigott, Samuel Hafner, Hermann Cesnik, Theresa Weiler, Kristina Leitner, Eva Dousset-Ortner ....................................................................................................... 41 Anthropocentrism in monolingual English learners’ dictionaries - Revisited Reinhard Heuberger ................................................................................................ 73 Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018: What does it tell us? Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina, Marjeta Vrbinc................................................. 85 Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education: A critical discourse overview Ricardo Römhild ..................................................................................................107 Reviews Benjamin Franklin and Gottfried Achenwall, Amerika 1766. Anmerkungen über Nordamerika, und über dasige Großbritannische Colonien, 2023. Julia Sattler..........................................................................................................139 Nada Šabec, Slovene Immigrants and their Descendants in North America: Faces of Identity. Maribor: University of Maribor Press, 2021. Walter Grünzweig .................................................................................................143 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Ein alphabetisches Autor: innenverzeichnis der Jahrgänge 1 (1976) bis 45 (2020) finden Sie unter https: / / elibrary.narr.digital/ journal/ aaa. An alphabetical list of authors who published in volumes 1 (1976) to 45 (2020) is available at https: / / elibrary.narr.digital/ journal/ aaa. 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KG Dischingerweg 5, 72070 Tübingen eMail: info@narr.de Internet: www.narr.de Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Beiträge sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, sind vorbehalten: Kein Teil dieser Zeitschrift darf ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages in irgendeiner Form - durch Fotokopie, Mikrofilm oder andere Verfahren - reproduziert oder in eine von Maschinen, insbesondere von Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, verwendbare Sprache übertragen werden. Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 ISBN 978-3-381-12361-2 Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model of the variety of English taught in German secondary schools Elen Le Foll English as it is taught in German schools (Schulenglisch) is often perceived to be radically different from natural English, as used outside the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. Previous corpus studies have confirmed that individual lexico-grammatical features are indeed often misrepresented in EFL textbooks used in Germany. This study presents an empirical multi-feature and multi-dimensional (MDA) analysis of the language of three series of EFL textbooks (15 textbook volumes) used at lower secondary school level in Germany, as compared to three target language reference corpora. Principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to identify the defining linguistic characteristics of Schulenglisch along three dimensions of linguistic variation: 1) ‘Written informational vs. Spoken interactional’, 2) ‘Fictional narrative’ and 3) ‘Didactised vs. Real-life English’. The distributions of texts on the first and second dimensions show that Schulenglisch is characterised by an underdifferentiation of registerbased variation as compared to ‘real-life’, extra-curricular English. Mixedeffects models show that this finding is consistent across all three textbook series. Intra-textbook variation is mediated - to varying degrees on each of the three dimensions of the model - by text register, the proficiency level targeted by the textbooks, and interactions between these variables. In line with lay beliefs about Schulenglisch, the largest gap between Schulenglisch and extra-curricular English is observed in the conversation register. This gap persists even as textbook proficiency level increases. Compared to transcripts of natural, everyday conversations, Schulenglisch conversation significantly underrepresents key features of spontaneous, interactional spoken English, such as discourse makers, fillers, negation, contracted verbs, demonstratives, and it-pronouns. At the same time, it overrepresents features more typical of written, informative writing such as nouns, prepositions, and high lexical density and diversity. Across all registers, linguistic features that are typical of Schulenglisch, especially at the AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2024-0001 Elen Le Foll 4 lower levels of proficiency, include imperatives, can as a modal, politeness markers and question forms. 1. Introduction (1) Ich kann ja nur schulenglisch! ‘(But) I only know school English! ’ 1 <deTenTen18: homepagemodules.de> In German-speaking countries, utterances such as (1) are frequently heard. The noun compound Schulenglisch - literally: ‘school English’ - even boasts its own entry in the Duden dictionary (duden.de: n.d.). It refers to “a form of English that marks its users as having acquired the language in school” (Grau 2009: 170). Querying a large web-based corpus of German (the deTenTen18; see Jakubíček et al. 2013) for Schulenglisch retrieves numerous instances in which the term is used to emphasise that this level of English proficiency acquired at school either (just about) suffices to complete a specific task (e.g., (2) or, more frequently, does not (e.g., (3)). (2) Mit dem Schulenglisch kommt man dort schon klar. ‘You can get by with school English there.’ <deTenTen18: gymnasiumpasewalk.de> (3) Ich lese keine Bücher auf Englisch, dafür reicht mein Schulenglisch leider nicht aus. ‘I don’t read books in English, unfortunately my school English is not good enough for that.’ <deTenTen18: buchbegegnungen.de> By the end of lower secondary education, German pupils are expected to have attained B1 level (CEFR; Council of Europe 2020) in English and B2 by the end of general upper secondary. This is comparable to other European countries. The term Schulenglisch, however, does not solely refer to the proficiency level that is acquired by the majority of students by the end of their compulsory schooling, it also characterises the English taught and learnt in German schools as a special variety of English. Thus, in everyday language, Schulenglisch is frequently used in opposition to ‘authentic’ or ‘real-life’ English: (4) Schulenglisch und das Original - zwei Welten treffen aufeinander... ‘School English and the original - two worlds collide…’ <deTen- Ten18: realschule-wedemark.de> 1 All translations are mine. Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 5 (5) Schulenglisch ist eine Sache, das, was man wirklich spricht, eine andere. ‘School English is one thing; how people really speak is another.’ <deTen- Ten18: buchdownload.at> This study attempts to shed light on this perceived gap between ‘real-life’ English and Schulenglisch. To this end, the language of three series of bestselling EFL textbooks used in secondary schools in Germany is examined. Though Schulenglisch usually refers more broadly to the variety of English both taught and acquired at school, the present study focuses on learners’ language input rather than their output. For the most part, students’ classroom-based English input stems from teacher talk, student production (both spoken and written) and pedagogical materials, foremost textbooks. Whilst this study focuses on the latter source of input, the following section explains how, in the German school context, EFL textbooks have a direct influence on the other two main sources: teacher and learner English production. 1.1. The role of EFL textbooks in secondary schools in Germany In Germany, education is the responsibility of the federal states, the Bundesländer. However, in describing the teaching of EFL across the country, Kurtz (2019: 116) speaks of the largely textbook-oriented everyday practice of teaching English. This is considered to be particularly true at lower secondary level, i.e., during the first five years of secondary education (Kurtz 2019: 122), where the textbook remains “the medium which has traditionally guided and organised teaching.” Anecdotal evidence from students and teachers suggests that - at least at lower secondary school level - this statement still rings true today. In fact, in some Bundesländer, this reliance on textbooks is more or less directly enshrined in the curriculum. For instance, the English curriculum for Gymnasium [secondary school for high-ability students] in Hessen proclaims that, at least for the first five years of secondary school, the textbook is the “Leitmedium [guiding medium]” (Hessisches Kultusministerium 2010: 4). The role of textbooks in German EFL classrooms has long been the subject of heated debates (see, e.g., Freudenstein 2001 and ensuing replies in “Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts”). Although scholars and teaching practitioners disagree as to whether textbooks should play such an important role in German EFL classrooms, the fact is that the tables of contents of commercially published EFL textbooks largely determine the syllabus, whilst the chapters and units of these textbooks are often translated one-to-one into lesson planning (see, e.g., Siepmann 2007: 59). Thus, textbooks largely determine both the linguistic and topical focus of lessons. Though some supplementary materials may be used at times, the textbooks’ texts, exercises and tasks make up the vast majority of classroom activities. Elen Le Foll 6 As a result, it is fair to say that, at lower secondary level in Germany, textbooks constitute learners’ foremost source of classroom-based English input. Given the centrality of the textbook as the determining Leitmedium, it is evident that considerable proportions of teacher-based and peer-based English-language input in the German EFL classroom are directly or indirectly mediated by the textbook, too. For instance, much of teacher talk at secondary level revolves around the textbook, its explanations, instructions, and tasks, and much of learner writing, teacher-learner and learnerlearner spoken interactions are produced on the basis of the tasks, prompts and models proposed by the same textbook (see, e.g., Thornbury 2002). 2. Schulenglisch: State of the art The empirical study of textbook language has a long tradition in Germany. From the late 1980s onwards, Mindt (1987; 1992; 1995; 2000; 2005) conducted elaborate analyses of the language of German school EFL textbooks as compared to natural English produced by native speakers. Mindt’s pioneering method is firmly corpus-driven. It begins with the compilation of a corpus of naturally occurring speech or pseudo-speech (e.g., play scripts). The focus on spoken English is justified by asserting that the acquisition of oral communicative skills is the foremost aim of secondary school ELT. Based on this corpus data, Mindt extrapolated detailed empirical grammars of specific lexico-grammatical features of English. These empirical grammars - which marked a clear break from the tradition of introspectionbased, deductive grammars - were then used to evaluate how these features were represented in both the grammar sections and textual content of school EFL textbooks. To this end, Mindt compared the frequencies, functions, and lexical co-occurrences of each examined feature. A number of scholars subsequently adopted Mindt’s method and compared the use of additional individual lexico-grammatical features in ‘authentic’ English to that of German school EFL textbooks. The following sections provide an overview of these empirical textbook-based Schulenglisch studies before presenting the present study’s approach and research questions. 2.1. The grammar of Schulenglisch In the first of such studies, Mindt (1987; 1992) examined representations of future time expressions in textbooks designed for lower secondary level with those actually produced in speech by British native speakers. The examined German EFL textbooks were found to underrepresent will, overrepresent going to and entirely ignore shall as a future time expression. The contracted forms of going to were also observed to be considerably underrepresented and the absence of gonna and ain’t was highlighted as a misrepresentation of ‘real-life’ English language use at the time of the Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 7 study. Mindt subsequently applied this method to examine the treatment of catenative verbs (1995; 2000) and, here too, reported that some of the most frequent - and consequently likely communicatively useful - verb constructions were absent from school grammars (e.g., need, begin, continue, appear, tend, fail, etc.). Inspired by this data-driven approach, Schlüter (2002) conducted a book-length corpus-driven analysis of the present perfect. In contrast to Mindt’s earlier works, this empirical grammar was derived on the basis of a native-speaker corpus consisting of both spoken and written English. This empirical grammar of the present perfect was contrasted to traditional, introspection-based grammars, as well as to the grammar sections of two popular series of secondary school EFL textbooks used in Germany, together with their accompanying grammar and activity books. Schlüter (2002) concluded that the textbooks presented the functions of the present perfect in substantially different ways. For example, the examined textbooks failed to explain that the present perfect progressive is often used to refer to iterative actions or events, focusing almost exclusively on its continuous function. The third book-length exploration of Schulenglisch to date was conducted by Römer (2005) who examined how the progressive is represented in the dialogues of two popular textbook series also designed for German secondary schools. Unlike Mindt’s earlier analyses which tacitly assumed that all textbook language ought to represent spoken English, Römer (2005) only examined occurrences of the progressives in the textbook passages explicitly intended to reflect spoken language use (printed dialogues, speech bubbles, transcripts of audio materials, etc.). By comparing these with how the progressive is used in everyday conversation among L1 speakers, her study is one of the few investigations of the language of textbooks to date that accounts for the fact that modality and register are likely to impact how such a grammatical construction is used in context. Among other findings, Römer (2005: 244-5) reported that contracted forms of the auxiliary BE are underrepresented among the progressive forms encountered in the textbook dialogues of her textbook corpus. Concerning the core functions of the progressive, Römer (2005: 260-6) noted that repeated actions or events in the progressive are underrepresented in textbook dialogues. In a conceptual replication study, Le Foll (2022a; 2022b: chap. 4) confirmed that the most noteworthy differences that Römer (2005) observed between the use of the progressive in German EFL textbook dialogues and natural spoken English remain problematic in recent German EFL textbooks. Using the same comparative corpus-based methodology (and partly the same data), Römer also compared the frequencies, co-occurrence patterns and functions of modal verbs (2004a) and if-conditionals (2004b) in authentic spoken British English and German secondary school EFL textbooks, hereby reporting many striking differences, too. For instance, Elen Le Foll 8 Römer (2004a) concluded that textbook conversation is characterised by the use of modals that most frequently refer to ability rather than the many other functions that they also fulfil in naturally occurring conversation. In Römer (2004b) the three tense sequences that correspond to what EFL textbooks and grammar books usually refer to as ‘Type 1’, ‘Type 2’ and ‘Type 3’ conditionals were found to be vastly overrepresented in textbook conversation as compared to naturally occurring spoken English. Conversely, Römer (2004b: 159-60) demonstrated that the most frequent tense combinations in if-sentences in the spoken component of the BNC2014 (simple present + simple present) as well as several other frequent tense sequences were significantly underrepresented in the texts of German EFL textbooks. These results have since largely been corroborated by Möller (2020) and Winter and Le Foll (2022) with more recent EFL textbook publications. 2.2. The lexis of Schulenglisch Whilst it is true that most studies of Schulenglisch to date have focused on grammar, corpus-based analyses have also examined the lexis and pragmatics of German EFL textbooks. For instance, Siepmann (2014) compared the phrasemes featured in the vocabulary sections of two series of secondary school EFL textbooks with a revised version of Martinez & Schmitt’s (2012) list of the most frequent “non-transparent phrasemes” found in the BNC1994. Fewer than a fifth of the phrasemes of the revised corpus-driven list were featured at least once in each textbook series. Siepmann (2014) concludes that the selection of phrases is therefore not based on frequency or, more worryingly, seemingly on any other systematic criteria. Strikingly, it was also not the case that the number of phrasemes featured in the examined textbooks increased as students’ English proficiency was expected to improve. 2.3. The pragmatics of Schulenglisch Among the few studies that have begun to explore the pragmatics of Schulenglisch, Limberg’s analyses of markers of politeness (2016a) and apologies (2016b) in German secondary school EFL textbooks both testify to a lack of systematic, recurrent treatment of these pragmatic phenomena. Ways to communicate politeness and to apologise are only rarely explicitly taught or featured in textbook tasks and activities. The few words and phrases that are taught tend to be presented with very little context resulting in learners not being sufficiently familiarised with the socio-cultural constraints of these lexical units (Limberg 2016a: 286-7). Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 9 3. Research questions In sum, numerous studies have pointed to major differences between how individual linguistic features are represented in Schulenglisch - as captured in EFL textbooks designed for secondary education in Germany - compared to various forms of ‘authentic’, ‘natural’ or ‘real-life’ English. However, to date, no study has attempted to model and provide empirical evidence for the similarities and differences between Schulenglisch and ‘real-life’ English a) across a broad range of linguistic features and b) taking account of systematic variation within Schulenglisch. This study aims to identify and describe the specificities of the language of EFL textbooks used at lower secondary school level in Germany using statistical methods that can model for the potential effects and interactions of textbook register, series, and proficiency levels across many different linguistic features. In doing so, it seeks answers to the following research questions: 1. To what extent does Schulenglisch vary across different: a) text registers b) textbook proficiency levels and c) textbook series? 2. How does Schulenglisch differ from the kind of naturally occurring English that learners can be expected to encounter and use outside the EFL classroom? 4. Data and methods This section begins with a description of the school EFL textbook corpus and the three reference corpora employed in this study. Multi-feature/ multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) is then introduced as a method for exploring differences and similarities across a wide range of linguistic features before outlining the modifications made to the traditional MDA framework for the present study. 4.1. Corpus description and processing It is fair to say that, by today’s standards, the reference corpora from which Mindt derived his empirical grammars (see 2.1) are rather small. Moreover, although Mindt’s analyses claimed to focus on representations of spoken English, the textbook language examined mostly consisted of written registers. Indeed, the transcripts and the listening exercises associated with the textbooks were not included in the analyses (Mindt 1987: 53). The choice of fictional texts (novels, plays and films) as reference corpora for so-called ‘authentic English’ may also be called into question. The present study aims to address these issues by analysing a corpus of textbooks that Elen Le Foll 10 includes the transcripts of audio and video materials (see 4.1.1) and by relying on larger reference corpora that correspond to the kind of language that German EFL learners can be expected to interact with outside the school classroom (see 4.1.2). 4.1.1. Textbook English Corpus (TEC) In the present study, Schulenglisch data stems from the German subcorpus of the Textbook English Corpus (TEC) (Le Foll 2021a; 2022b). The TEC is made up of all the texts printed in 43 EFL coursebooks used in secondary schools in France, Germany and Spain, as well as the transcripts of their accompanying audio and video materials. To enable comparisons across different educational systems, their target English proficiency levels have been labelled from A to E; with A corresponding to the first year of EFL instruction at secondary school, and E to the fifth year. The German subcorpus of the TEC comprises 15 textbooks from three textbook series commonly used in Germany (see Table 1). The three series largely follow a content-based, integrated-skills syllabus with each chapter and/ or unit covering a different topic with a range of diverse texts, tasks, and activities. Publisher Textbook series Volume Age group Proficiency level Year of publication Klett Green Line 1 11-12 y. A 2006 2 12-13 y. B 2006 3 13-14 y. C 2007 4 14-15 y. D 2008 5 15-16 y. E 2009 Klett Green Line New 1 11-12 y. A 2014 2 12-13 y. B 2015 3 13-14 y. C 2016 4 14-15 y. D 2017 Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 11 5 15-16 y. E 2018 Cornelsen Access G 1 11-12 y. A 2013 2 12-13 y. B 2014 3 13-14 y. C 2015 4 14-15 y. D 2016 5 15-16 y. E 2017 Table 1. Composition of the German subcorpus of the TEC. The textbooks of the TEC were manually subdivided into text units, where one exercise, reading passage, or transcript corresponds to one text unit. These texts were also annotated for eight major textbook registers: Conversation, Informative writing, Fiction, Personal correspondence (letters, diary entries, social media posts, and e-mails), Instructional (instructions and explanations), Poetry (songs and poems), Other texts (timetables, shopping lists, etc.) and Words & Phrases (e.g., contextless words and sentences from exercises). Defining text units in textbooks is not a trivial task. Numerous possibilities arise (see Le Foll 2020). One major issue is that many textbook texts are too short for the normalised frequency of most linguistic features to be reliable. Up until now, entire textbook series or volumes have often been conceived as single texts. However, such an approach cannot account for intra-textbook variation. Whether or not a text is of an appropriate length for normalised frequencies to be meaningful depends on the expected frequency of the least frequent linguistic features. For the present study (as in Le Foll 2022b and following Biber 1988), a minimum length of 400 words per text was chosen. This was necessary to ensure that less frequent linguistic features have a reasonable chance of occurring within a text unit and thus obtain comparable feature frequencies. Shorter texts within each textbook volume and register were therefore collated into longer text files. This means that, for example, short, consecutive instructional texts from any one textbook volume were combined until a total word count of at least 400 words was reached. This task was performed sequentially within each textbook volume so that short files of the same register and from within a chapter/ unit or across directly adjacent chapters/ units were merged. As a result, the progression that the learners are expected to make is retained in the collated text files. Elen Le Foll 12 TEC texts classified as Words & Phrases were excluded from the present analyses as this study focuses on coherent texts only. Poetry and Other texts also had to be excluded as there were too few of them in the German subcorpus of the TEC for inclusion in the present multivariate analysis. Following these data preparation steps, 804 textbook texts (hereafter collectively referred to as the TEC-Ger, see Table 2) were analysed. Textbook Register Number of texts Number of words Conversation 267 244,992 Fiction 194 166,914 Informative 92 79,012 Instructional 217 195,387 Personal Correspondence 34 27,128 Total 804 713,433 Table 2. Composition of the TEC-Ger. 4.1.2. Target Language Reference Corpora The German Core Curriculum stresses the need for learners of English to learn to deal with “authentic” texts, in particular in listening and reading comprehension (Kultusministerkonferenz 2012: 12, 15, 18). Up until recently, there was no doubt that ‘authenticity’ was defined by nativespeaker norms. Today, the German Education Standard for the general higher education entrance level (Abitur) states that: Sprachlicher Orientierungspunkt sind Standardsprache(n) sowie Register, Varietäten und Akzente, deren Färbung ein Verstehen nicht generell behindert. ‘The linguistic point of reference is standard language(s), as well as registers, varieties and accents, whose distinctiveness do not generally impede comprehension.’ (Kultusministerkonferenz 2012: 14 emphases added) In reality, however, “standard English” typically amounts to either a British or a US-American English norm. Whilst acknowledging the plurality of different “registers, varieties and accents,” only ‘standard English’ in the German ELT context is associated with the notion of ‘correctness’: Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 13 Die Entwicklung der funktionalen kommunikativen Kompetenzen ist bezogen auf die geläufige und korrekte Verfügung über die sprachlichen Mittel in den Bereichen: Aussprache und Intonation, Orthographie, Wortschatz, Grammatik. ‘The development of functional communicative competence [in a foreign language] refers to the typical/ frequent and correct use of linguistic features in the areas of: pronunciation and intonation, spelling, vocabulary and grammar.’ (Kultusministerkonferenz 2003: 9; emphases added) Thus, despite not (officially) adhering to any (specific) native-speaker norm(s), the objectives set out by German educational authorities stipulate that pupils are expected to be taught “correct,” “typical,” and “frequent” English forms. Whilst measures of correctness necessarily involve some subjective judgements, objective measures of typicality and frequency of occurrence in English as it occurs naturally outside the EFL classroom can be made on the basis of corpus data. At the same time, it is clear that such measures of frequency and typicality will differ depending on the situational context of language use. To answer the second research question, this study focuses on three major Schulenglisch registers: Conversation, Fiction, and Informative texts. To this end, it compares these three register subcorpora of the TEC-Ger with reference corpora of situationally similar target language registers. The following section briefly outlines the composition of these reference corpora. The TEC-Ger Conversation subcorpus is compared to the Spoken BNC2014, an 11.4-million-word corpus of 1,251 orthographically transcribed conversations among L1 speakers in the UK (Love et al. 2017). The Spoken BNC2014 is rich in metadata and has been manually anonymised. For the present study, all mark-ups have been eliminated and anonymising tags replaced with placeholders of the corresponding word class (see Le Foll 2022b for details). The TEC-Ger Fiction subcorpus is compared to the Youth Fiction corpus, which consists of 300 (mostly contemporary) novels targeted at teenagers and young adults (Le Foll 2022b). For the present study, four random samples of approximately 5,000 words were extracted from each of these 300 books (splitting was performed at sentence boundaries, hence the slightly varying word counts), except for three short stories, which were only sampled once each in full. With a total of 1,191 Youth Fiction texts, this procedure resulted in a number of texts comparable to that of the Spoken BNC2014. The Informative Texts for Teens corpus (hereafter Info Teens) was compiled by first retrieving over 10,000 texts from 14 popular web domains of news and information specially targeted at English-speaking teenagers. Care was taken to include a broad range of topics including current affairs, science, technology, history, and entertainment. Of these, 4,895 text files were under 400 words and were thus discarded. Following a stratified sampling approach, 100 texts from each web domain were randomly selected Elen Le Foll 14 from the remaining texts. This number was chosen to approximately match the number of texts in the other two reference corpora. Fewer than 100 texts longer than 400 words were retrieved from three domains; for these, the full domain subcorpora were retained (see Table 3). Domain name Number of texts Number of words bbc.co.uk/ history 100 74,722 dogonews.com 100 60,762 ducksters.com 100 67,894 encyclopdia.kids.net.au 100 74,566 factmonster.com 100 60,395 historyforkids.net 100 71,955 quatr.us 100 62,254 revisionworld.com (GCSE only) 97 74,301 sciencekids.co.nz 100 57,097 Sciencenewsforstudents.org 100 82,258 teen.wng.org 85 45,515 teenkidsnews.com 100 81,765 teenvogue.com 100 82,117 tweentribune.com 29 26,166 whyfiles.org 100 85,492 Total 1,411 1,007,259 Table 3. Composition of the Info Teens corpus. 4.2. Multivariate analysis method 4.2.1. Multi-feature/ multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) The present study explores Schulenglisch using a modified version of Biber’s (1988) multi-feature/ multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) framework. The traditional MDA framework relies on exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to reduce the co-occurrence patterns of a large matrix of lexico-grammatical feature counts to a parsimonious set of latent factors. The basic procedure, as described by Biber and Gray (2013: 403; see also Berber Sardinha & Veirano Pinto 2019), involves eight steps: Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 15 1. Corpus design, text collection and processing 2. Identification of the set of linguistic features to be entered in the MDA 3. Development of scripts (i.e., taggers) to automatically identify these features 4. Tagging of all the texts of the corpus 5. Tag counting and normalisation of the feature frequencies 6. Factor analysis of the feature count matrix 7. Calculation of factor scores and comparison of mean factor scores for relevant groups of texts 8. Interpretation of the factors as underlying dimensions of variation In other words, factors represent groups of linguistic features that tend to co-occur. They are understood to represent major ‘dimensions’ of variation. Each text is attributed a score on each dimension and the mean scores of groups of texts are compared to understand the nature of linguistic similarities and differences between groups of texts. In the first published MDA study, Biber (1988) proposed a model of ‘General Written and Spoken English’ with six functional dimensions of variation. It was elaborated based on the co-occurrence patterns of 67 (largely automatically tagged) linguistic features observed in a large corpus covering a broad range of registers, including face-to-face conversation, press reports, official documents, novels, and letters. The first four dimensions were labelled as: 1. Involved vs. Informational Production 2. Narrative vs. Non-narrative Concerns 3. Situation-dependent vs. Elaborated reference 4. Overt expression of argumentation This pioneering study inspired many subsequent MDA studies exploring functional variation in a range of languages, language varieties and specialised registers (see Biber 2019 for an overview). The present study applies a modified MDA framework to describe Schulenglisch as represented in the TEC-Ger (see 4.1.1) and to compare this variety of English with three reference corpora representing ‘real-life’, extra-curricular English (see 4.1.2). 4.2.2. The feature matrix The texts of the TEC-Ger and of the three reference corpora were tagged using the MFTE Perl (Le Foll 2021c), which tags and counts over 80 different lexico-grammatical features ranging from question tags to the perfect aspect and including semantic features such as verbs of communication and time adverbials. The tagger’s accuracy was formally tested in Le Foll (2021c). The MFTE outputs two tables of normalised frequencies per feature and text. Following the modified MDA framework (Le Foll to appear: chap. 5) applied in the present study, the tagger’s ‘complex normalisation’ Elen Le Foll 16 output was used. In this matrix of counts, no blanket per-word normalisation basis is applied. Instead, many feature counts are normalised per 100 finite verb phrases (FVPs; e.g., present tense) or 100 nouns (e.g., attributive adjectives) (see Appendix 2). Whilst it is not the standard approach in MDA studies, this kind of normalisation ensures that texts of different lengths can be compared whilst reducing the potential for grammatically induced correlations such as between the number of finite verbs and present tense occurrences or verbal contractions. Indeed, the risk with blanket wordbased normalisations is that we obtain dimensions that essentially only distinguish between texts with many finite verbs as opposed to those with relatively few, or dimensions that reflect little more than the relative frequencies of nouns (see Le Foll 2022b: 281-4). In addition to normalisation, and following Biber (1988: 94) the counts were also standardised to z-scores to avoid more common linguistic features exerting undue influences on the model. Finally, the standardised normalised feature frequencies were transformed (with a signed log transformation) to partially compensate for their often highly skewed distributions (cf. Neumann & Evert 2021: 155). It can be argued that such a transformation makes the interpretation of the results more difficult; however, the traditional MDA framework already applies z-standardisation which also represents a trade-off between interpretability and robustness. Experiments on similar linguistic data suggest that signed log transformation leads to more robust results as it reduces the influence of outlier texts on the multivariate analysis. Four features tagged by the MFTE were excluded as they were found to be absent from more than a third of texts. Some features tagged by the MFTE also had to be merged with functionally related features to form more general categories due to low communalities ( ≤ 0.20). This led to the merging of a) the BE -able-to construction with predicative adjectives, b) the BE and GET -passives categories, c) singular and plural third-person references, and d) time and frequency adverbials. As a result, the final matrix of counts included signed log standardised normalised frequencies for 73 linguistic features. The full list of features is provided in Appendix 2. 4.2.3. Principal component analysis MDA relies on a multivariate statistical method to explore differences between texts and groups of texts in a multi-dimensional feature space. In a methodological synthesis of MDA studies, Goulart & Wood (2021: 124) report that, to date, this has most commonly been achieved with exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The present study, however, employs principal component analysis (PCA), as did, e.g., Biber & Egbert (2016; 2018) and Neumann & Evert (2021). Whilst EFA aims to identify latent variables by partitioning shared variance from unique and error variance, PCA focuses Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 17 solely on reducing data dimensionality (Loewen & Gonulal 2015). As a result, EFA is assumed to offer a higher degree of generalisability to other, unsampled variables (Velicer & Jackson 1990a: 17). That said, studies based on real and simulated datasets have demonstrated that EFA and PCA produce very similar results under most conditions (see Velicer & Jackson 1990a; 1990b for summaries). The degree of similarity increases with larger sample sizes and higher factor saturation (Velicer & Jackson 1990a: 6). One critical factor that can lead to consequential differences, however, is the extraction of too many factors or components (“over-factoring”; Velicer & Jackson 1990a: 10). Schönemann (1990: 47) concludes that the methods are “virtually indistinguishable” as long as the same rotation is used, the same number of factors/ components are retained, and the number of retained factors/ components is small relative to the total number of observed variables. The latter is typical of corpus-linguistic studies that tend to have far more variables than the PCAs and EFAs typically conducted in other disciplines, e.g., in psychology for scale and questionnaire validation. Given that the two methods are likely to yield highly similar results with this study’s large sample size (4,657 texts) and number of variables (73 linguistic features), PCA was chosen over EFA for its greater transparency and computational stability (see Le Foll 2022b: 284-6). The programming environment R was used to run the PCA and visualise the results (for details of all the R packages, functions and parameters used, see Appendix 3). 4.2.4. Computing and comparing dimension scores Step 7 of the MDA framework (see 4.2.1) involves computing a factor/ dimension score for each dimension and each text. Features with factor loadings below a pre-determined cut-off point are usually excluded from the computation of their respective factor scores. Additionally, if a feature loads onto more than one factor with a loading above this cut-off point, it only contributes to the factor on which it has the highest loading. In many MDA studies (e.g., Biber 1988), dimension scores are calculated by adding the standardised normalised frequencies for each of the salient positiveloading features and subtracting the salient negative-loading ones. This equates to a dichotomisation of feature factor loadings since all features that have loadings higher (in absolute terms) than the chosen cut-off point make equal contributions to the dimension scores, whilst those that are excluded from the dimension scores do not contribute at all. It has been argued that such unit-weighing approaches to calculating dimension scores can make scores more robust by mitigating error propagation (see Grice 2001: 67-68). However, this study, like Bohmann (2019: 91), adopts an exact scoring method. Dimension scores are calculated by multiplying the standardised Elen Le Foll 18 normalised feature frequencies of any one text by their respective component loadings on that dimension (which may be positive or negative) and adding all these values. It is therefore no longer necessary to remove lowloading features given that, following this approach, they only make very small, often practically insignificant contributions to dimension scores. Grice’s (2001) simulations on datasets from published psychology studies suggest that exact scoring methods such as this one tend to generate more valid and less biased results than unit-weighing approaches. This approach also has the advantage of allowing features to load on multiple dimensions. This is important given that cross-loading features are very common in MDAs and that most linguistic phenomena are known to be highly correlated. To compare different registers on any one dimension, the mean dimension scores of all the texts in any one register are calculated. Such comparisons have typically been quantified and tested for statistical significance using linear regression models (most often with just one predictor in the form of ANOVAs) and their associated coefficients of determination (e.g., Berber Sardinha & Veirano Pinto 2019: 6; Biber 1988: 95; Kruger & van Rooy 2018: 244; Bohmann 2019: 188-90; 2021). A crucial assumption of such models is that the data points be independent of each other. In the context of the present MDA, this assumption is, however, not met. Each of the textbook series of the TEC-Ger has largely been written by the same group of authors. The texts of the TEC-Ger are therefore not truly independent. Similarly, the Youth Fiction and the Info Teens corpora are made up of several samples from any one novel or web domain (see 4.1.2). Hence, in order to quantify group-level patterns across unbalanced group categories and account for variation inherent to the non-independence of some of the texts, the dimension scores of the Conversation, Fiction and Informative texts of the TEC-Ger were compared to those of the three reference corpora using linear mixed-effects models with the R package lme4 (Bates et al. 2015; see Candarli 2022 for a similar approach). For the random effect structure, the categorical metadata variable ‘Source’ was created. It features three levels corresponding to the three textbook series of the TEC-Ger, 300 book levels for Youth Fiction, 14 web domain levels for Info Teens, and one level for the Spoken BNC2014. These categories were chosen as the best-available proxies to capture the variation inherent to each (group of) author(s)/ editor(s) (see Le Foll 2022b: 215-9). For each dimension, a maximal model with the fixed effects of Level (i.e., textbook levels A, B, C, D and E and Reference corpus), register (i.e., Conversation, Fiction, and Informative) and their two-way interactions, and of Source as a random effect was first computed. Subsequently, backward model selection based on the Akaike information criterion (an estimator of prediction error which takes account of both goodness of fit and model complexity) was performed (as explained in Zuur et al. 2009: 120-8). Model diagnostic Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 19 plots were also inspected to check the assumptions of linearity, homogeneity of variance, and the normal distribution of residuals of the models (see Appendix 3 for data, code, and full details of the analyses). 4.3. Results PCA was applied to the matrix of 4,657 texts (i.e., the 804 texts of the TEC- Ger, 1,411 from the Info Teens, 1,251 from the Spoken BNC2014 and 1,191 from the Youth Fiction corpus) by 73 feature (see Appendix 2) frequencies, all zand signed log-transformed as outlined in 4.2.2. The matrix’s overall KMO factor adequacy index of 0.93 indicated that the data is highly suitable for this type of analysis (Kaiser & Rice 1974: 112). To determine the number of components to explore, a scree plot was generated (see Fig. 1). It shows the amount of variance each component captures. Following the “scree test” method (see, e.g., Costello & Osborne 2005: 3), the first three components were retained for further analysis. Together, they account for 46% of the total variance of the matrix. Fig. 1. Scree plot of the eigenvalues of the principal components (PCs). Elen Le Foll 20 Fig. 2. Projections of the texts of the TEC-Ger and the three reference copora on the three dimensions of the model (PC1, PC2 and PC3) (see Appendix 4 for 3-D version). Fig. 2 visualises the position of the texts of the corpora on the three dimensions of the model. In this plot and all subsequent scatterplots, each point represents the position of a single text: textbook texts are denoted with filled circles, whereas triangles represent the texts of the reference corpora. The colours of the points correspond to the texts’ register category and subcorpus. The closer two texts are, the more linguistic similarities they share. The first finding to emerge from this three-dimensional plot is that register-based variation is considerably less marked in the texts of the TEC-Ger than across the three reference corpora. Indeed, whilst the first three dimensions reveal well-defined clusters for the reference corpora (red, bright green and dark blue triangles) - with hardly any overlap -, the five textbook registers overlap considerably. The only textbook register with a very distinct linguistic profile is that of instructional language (in orange) - as highlighted on PC3. Fig. 2 also suggests that the TEC-Ger Fiction texts and those of the Youth Fiction corpus share many linguistic similarities. Though to a lesser extent, this is also true of the Informative textbook texts and the Info Teens corpus. By contrast, there are far fewer overlaps between the clusters of the TEC-Ger Conversation and the Spoken BNC2014 on all three dimensions. This suggests a considerable gap between natural conversational English and how spoken English is taught in Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 21 German schools. These comparisons will be explored in more depth in the following. To this end, mixed-effects models of the dimensions scores are used to tease out the extent to which different factors drive language variation on each of the model’s three dimensions of linguistic variation. Together, the first two dimensions (PC1 and PC2) explain 39% of the total variance of the feature matrix. Fig. 3 shows that, whilst all five textbook register ellipses (representing 90% confidence intervals) are concentrated in the middle of the plot, those of the three target reference corpora are clearly separated from one another. Nonetheless, it hints at some register-based variation within textbooks, too. This is particularly true of the first dimension (PC1), which represents a continuum between spontaneous real-life spoken interactions (as captured by the Spoken BNC2014) at the negative end of the cline and informationally dense, written texts at the positive end (as captured by the Info Teens corpus). On this dimension, the Conversation and Informative texts of the TEC-Ger are clearly separated. This dimension is very reminiscent of Biber’s (1988) Dimension 1. It can be functionally interpreted as a dimension representing ‘Written informational vs. Spoken interactional’ variation. Similarly, the second dimension (PC2) to emerge from the present PCA echoes Biber’s (1988) Dimension 2. It serves to distinguish between fiction and the other four registers examined. Hence, here, only the negative pole is labelled as: ‘Fictional narrative’. Elen Le Foll 22 Fig. 3. Projection of the texts of the TEC-Ger and the three reference corpora on PC1 and PC2 Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 23 Fig. 4 shows the linguistic features that make the greatest contributions to the first and second dimensions and hence to the position of the texts on Fig. 3. Longer arrows and darker shades represent the strongest contributions. Fig. 4 confirms that the first two dimensions share many similarities with Biber’s (1988) first two dimensions as, on the first dimension, many of the strongest contributing features overlap with those that also have the highest absolute loadings on Biber’s (1988) Dimension 1, e.g., verbal contractions (CONT) and discourse markers (DMA) at the ‘Spoken interactional’ end and nouns (NN), longer average word length (AWL), prepositions (IN) and higher lexical density (LD) towards the ‘Written informational’ end. Similarly, the ‘Narrative’ pole of the second dimension is characterised by high frequencies of past tense finite verb phrases (VBD) and third-person references (TPP3). In addition, Fig. 4 confirms that multiple features make significant contributions to both the first and second dimensions. The position of the ellipse corresponding to the Personal Correspondence texts of the TEC-Ger on Fig. 3 indicates that a large proportion of these texts shares similarities with the Fiction texts from the same corpus, whilst others are more akin to the dialogues of the same textbooks. The least overlap between the ellipse of a target reference corpus and its corresponding TEC-Ger register can be observed at the negative end of the first dimension: the texts of the Spoken BNC2014 score considerably lower than the dialogues of the TEC-Ger on this dimension. Conversely, on average, the informative texts found in contemporary German EFL textbooks score lower on PC1 than the functionally similar texts of the Info Teens corpus. On the second dimension, the TEC-Ger Fiction ellipse is also notably shifted away from the ‘Narrative’ end of the dimension as compared to the ellipse of the target reference Youth Fiction corpus. Together, these observations suggest that, in Schulenglisch, text registers are linguistically less clearly delineated than in the kind of ‘real-life’ English that German EFL learners can be expected to encounter outside the EFL classroom. Elen Le Foll 24 Fig. 4. Biplot of the features with the strongest contributions to PC1 and PC2 (see Appendix 2 for key to feature abbreviations). A model predictig PC1 scores with Corpus (two levels: TEC-Ger and Reference), Register (three levels: Conversation, Fiction, and Informative) and their interactions as independent variables explains 88% of the variance (marginal R 2 ) in PC1 scores across these six (sub)corpora. Interestingly, model comparisons show that the variation observable along PC1 is not significantly mediated by the textbooks’ advertised proficiency levels. For the same model, the conditional R 2 value, which additionally accounts for variation due to Source, explains as much as 94% of the total variance. Within the random effect structure, however, the coefficient estimates of the three textbook series are negligible: 0.16 [95% CI: 0.07-0.25] for Access G, -0.07 [95% CI: -0.19-0.05] for Green Line and -0.01 [95% CI: -0.20- 0.00] for Green Line New (see Appendix 3). This suggests that hardly any of the linguistic variation observable along the first dimension is due to Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 25 any systematic differences between the three textbook series under examination or the proficiency level for which the textbooks were designed. Crucially, this also means that the substantial gap between the Conversation texts of the TEC-Ger and natural conversation (as captured in the Spoken BNC2014) observed on the first dimension is consistent across different textbook series and textbook proficiency levels. Similarly, a large proportion of informative texts in German EFL textbooks are, across all proficiency levels, very different to those of the Info Teens corpus. We can therefore conclude that variation on Dimension 1 is driven, foremost, by text register and, second, by differences between Schulenglisch and extra-curricular English, rather than by any idiosyncrasies of textbook authors/ editors, or as a result of varying textbook proficiency levels. Fig. 5. Scores on Dimension 2 for the Conversation, Fiction, and Informative texts of the TEC-Ger and the three corresponding reference corpora (Spoken BNC2014, Youth Fiction, and Info Teens) as predicted by the model: lm(PC2 ~1 + Level: Register + (1|Source), data = dim.scores). Horizontal lines represent mean predicted scores. Elen Le Foll 26 This is not true of the second ‘Narrative’ dimension, where proficiency level is found to be a significant predictor of PC2 scores. That said, as illustrated in Fig. 5 (see also model summaries and comparisons in Appendix 3), this effect is almost entirely driven by the interaction between the Fiction register and Level A (beginner) textbooks. The large gaps between both the Spoken BNC2014 and Level A Conversation texts, on the one hand, and the Youth Fiction corpus and Level A Fiction texts, on the other, are largely due to the fact that past tense is not generally being introduced until the end of the first year of EFL tuition. The linguistic features that make the greatest contributions to these differences between the Fiction texts of the TEC-Ger and those of the Youth Fiction corpus are plotted in Fig. 6. Here, each data point represents the frequency of the linguistic feature (as normalised by the MFTE; see 4.2.2.) in a single text. The grey points correspond to the relative frequencies of the texts of the Youth Fiction corpus, whilst those of the TEC-Ger Fiction are in colour and are subdivided by textbook proficiency level (A to E, see Table 1). The first row of boxplots in Fig. 6 illustrates the main difference between beginner (Level A) Fiction and the remaining Fiction texts of the TEC-Ger: most Level A Fiction texts feature present-tense (see (6) for an example), as opposed to past tense narration, as commonly found in most fictional texts (e.g., (7)). Since the present-tense variable contributes to positive scores on PC2, whilst past tense contributes to negative ones (see Fig. 4) this is the main reason why level A Fiction texts score considerably higher on PC2 than the remaining fictional texts from the TEC-Ger. In addition, Fig. 6 reminds us that the modals could and would, as well as the perfect aspect, are not introduced until the third year of secondary school tuition in German schools. As these features also contribute to lower PC2 scores, their absence in beginner level textbook texts further contributes to the only partial overlap between the TEC-Ger Fiction and the Youth Fiction ellipses on Fig. 3. Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 27 Fig. 6. Normalised frequencies of the features that make the greatest contributions to negative Dimension 2 scores in the texts of the TEC-Ger Fiction (subdivided by proficiency levels A to E) and the Youth Fiction reference corpus (Ref.). Elen Le Foll 28 On average, the Fiction texts of the TEC-Ger also feature lower frequencies of downtoners, general adverbs, particles and occurrences of the perfect aspect, which are four additional features that characterise the texts of the Youth Fiction corpus on PC2, see (7). (6) Dick helps the cook in the kitchen and then Dick wants to sleep. The cook shows him a bed in the kitchen. But there are mice there, and Dick can’t sleep. In the morning Dick goes to a shop and takes four bags back to the house. <TEC-Ger: Green Line 1> 2 (7) The pears and butter went into the saucepan. Never mind the syrup spilled on the floor. “Beezus! ” Ramona held up the package of peas. Beezus groaned. Out came the partially cooked chicken while she stirred the thawing peas into the yoghurt and shoved the dish back into the oven. The rice! They had forgotten the rice, which was only beginning to stick to the pan. <Youth Fiction: Beverly (1981): Ramona Quimby, Age 8> In interpreting the results of the three-dimensional plot in Fig. 2, we already noted that the third dimension (PC3) foremost highlights the unique nature of the instructional texts of the TEC-Ger. This is also evident from the projection of texts on the first and third dimensions in Fig. 7, on which instructional textbook texts clearly score lowest, with little overlap with other registers. 2 In all corpus examples, the linguistic features discussed in the main text have been highlighted in bold. Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 29 Fig. 7. Projection of the texts of the TEC-Ger and the three reference corpora on PC1 and PC3. Elen Le Foll 30 The features that contribute most to this highly distinctive linguistic profile are, in descending order of their contributions to negative PC3 scores: WHquestions, imperative verbs, second-person references, communication verbs, the modal can, and yes-no-questions, e.g.: (8) Swap your cards with another group. Check their cards. Do all the action cards go with the name cards? Are the verb forms and spelling right? Write corrections and give them back to the group. […] You can use these phrases: Whose turn is it? It’s my/ your/ Maria’s turn. <TEC-Ger: Access G 1> In addition to revealing the linguistic distinctiveness of instructions and explanations in German EFL textbooks, Fig. 7 also suggests that PC3 represents a ‘Didactised vs. Real-life English’ dimension as the ellipses of the TEC-Ger are all shifted towards the negative end of the dimension as compared to those of the three reference corpora which, unlike on PC1 and PC2, are all located within the same region on this dimension. Comparisons of mixed-effects models for PC3 scores showed that, whilst Register and Level as independent variables both contribute to more accurate prediction of PC3 scores, their two-way interactions are not significant. As shown in the visualisation of predicted scores in Fig. 8, the tendency for TEC-Ger texts to be located towards the negative end of this third dimension is strongly associated with the textbooks’ targeted proficiency levels. Thus, as learners are expected to become more proficient, PC3 scores increase. However, for all three registers depicted om Fig. 8, even the most advanced texts of the TEC-Ger score, on average, somewhat lower on this third dimension than the texts of the reference corpora. Hence, this third dimension appears to capture both proficiency-level based linguistic variation, as well as more generalisable differences between Schulenglisch and extra-curricular English. That said, the random effect variable Source also plays an important role in predicting PC3 scores; in particular, PC3 scores differ considerably between individual books and web domains, resulting in numerous outlier texts outside the Youth Fiction and Info Teens ellipses on Fig. 7. Systematic differences in PC3 scores associated with textbook series, however, are far more modest. On average, Green Line New texts tend to be slightly less shifted towards the extra-curricular English side of Dimension 3 than Access G and the previous edition of Green Line (see Appendix 3 for details). Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 31 Fig. 8. Predicted PC3 scores of the Conversation, Fiction, and Informative texts of the TEC Ger and the three corresponding reference corpora (Spoken BNC2014, Youth Fiction, and Info Teens). An analysis of the features that contribute to low PC3 scores indicates that, across all registers, Schulenglisch tends to feature more second-person references, yes-no (YNQU) and WH-questions, and politeness markers (e.g., (9)). In addition, a comparison of negativevs. positive-loading features on PC3 strongly suggests that Schulenglisch relies heavily on the modal can at the expense of all other modal verbs (MDNE, MDMM, MDWS, MDWO, MDCO), which are considerably less frequent in the texts of the TEC-Ger than in extra-curricular English. In general, Schulenglisch is more strongly characterised by the features it largely lacks or underrepresents as compared to naturally occurring English. These include features associated with more complex grammatical constructions such as split auxiliaries, that-subordinate clauses, concessives, passive constructions and, to a lesser extent, that-omission and that-relative clauses. Gradually introducing EFL learners to these features makes pedagogical sense. Encouragingly, the results of the mixed-effects models suggest that this is the intention of the Elen Le Foll 32 textbook authors given that, as shown in Fig. 8, PC3 scores progressively increase as textbook proficiency level increases. (9) Can I help you? Yes, have you got the new ‘Pets’ magazine, please? I can’t find it. It’s there next to the sports magazines. Excuse me. Where can I try on this sweatshirt? There, on the left. Thanks. I like the colour, but the size isn’t right. No problem. We’ve got other sizes, too. <TEC-Ger: Green Line 1> 5. Discussion The first research question focused on intra-textbook variation. It asked: To what extent does Schulenglisch vary across different: (a) text registers (b) textbook proficiency levels and (c) textbook series? The results of the present study demonstrate that, like all language varieties, Schulenglisch is not monolithic but rather varies in several systematic ways. On the first dimension of linguistic variation that emerged from this PCA-based MDA (and which explains most of the variance in the data), text register represents by far the most important source of variation in Schulenglisch. This is also true of the second dimension which differentiates between the Fiction register and all other Schulenglisch registers, with some overlap between Personal Correspondence and Fiction. On the third, ‘Didactised vs. Real-life English’ dimension, by contrast, textbook proficiency level explains most of the variance in the PC3 scores of the texts of the TEC-Ger. This is largely due to this dimension being characterised by linguistic features that are only gradually introduced to German EFL learners. In addition, the third dimension highlights instructional texts as a very distinct form of language use. With this in mind, it is worth reflecting on the fact that a large proportion of secondary school learners’ classroom-based English input consists of instructional language. It represents over a quarter of the total word counts of German school EFL textbooks (see 4.1.1). Textbook proficiency level is also a driver of linguistic variation on the second dimension. However, here, the effect is almost dichotomised: only the differences observed between Level A (first year of secondary school) and the remaining levels are significant. In contrast to register, proficiency level, and their interactions, which were shown to mediate linguistic variation in Schulenglisch to various degrees, the analyses show that Schulenglisch is remarkably homogenous Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 33 across the three series of the TEC-Ger on all three dimensions of the models. It would thus seem that the kind of Schulenglisch that EFL learners in Germany are exposed to is highly comparable regardless of the textbook. It goes without saying that the latter observation is highly tentative and that future research ought to analyse the language of other widely-used textbook series before it can be confirmed. The second research question asked how Schulenglisch differs from ‘reallife’, extra-curricular English. The first two dimensions of the model (see Fig. 3) show that Schulenglisch as a variety of English occupies a subspace of the register variation observed in ‘real-life’ English. As illustrated by the overlaps of textbook register ellipses in Fig. 2, a defining characteristic of Schulenglisch appears to be that, apart from instructional texts which form a very distinct register, its registers are linguistically less clearly defined than in natural English. This underdifferentiation of register in Schulenglisch is potentially problematic as it could mislead learners into thinking that English hardly varies across different situational contexts of use (see also Rühlemann 2008). The comparative analyses have also highlighted similarities and differences between the Conversation, Fiction, and Informative texts of the TEC-Ger and their corresponding target reference corpora. In particular, representations of conversational English in the TEC-Ger were found to differ significantly from natural conversation, as captured in the Spoken BNC2014. Previous studies have shown that this is also the case in the French and Spanish subcorpora of the TEC (Le Foll 2021a; 2022b; to appear). Although some may argue that transcripts of informal conversations in the UK may not be the ideal corpus to represent the spoken target norm for German secondary school EFL learners (see 4.1.2), such systematic and generalised linguistic differences arguably risk impeding learners’ development of spoken interactional competences. Indeed, this study has shown that textbook dialogues (which include the transcripts of the audio and video materials associated with the textbooks, see 4.1.1) lack many of the features that are characteristic of spontaneous, interactional language, such as discourse markers, fillers and interjections, emphatics, yes/ no and tag questions, as well as features that are particularly useful when interlocutors share common knowledge and a common environment, e.g., demonstratives, quantifiers and it-pronouns, see (10). Additionally, representations of spoken English in Schulenglisch are much more nominal and thus feature more prepositions, longer words, and higher type/ token ratios, which may result in unrealistic speech models, e.g., (11). (10) I believe in science though yeah I mean that’s kind of what I believe as well […] exactly I’m not saying it’s true I’m saying that’s what that’s why I don’t believe it Elen Le Foll 34 because I was saying it’s possible but I don’t believe in it aha which is what I’m saying which I guess you could say is the same thing as just saying I don’t believe in religion <BNC2014: S8Q3> (11) I’m glad he’s interested in Australia, but next time he should be a bit more careful about what he says. I’ve never believed that all Germans wear Lederhosen and drink beer all day. Maybe he’s got some more real questions about Australia. <TEC-Ger: Green Line 5> Whilst textbook dialogues often display more of the features typical of written, informative texts than natural conversation, many of the informative texts of the TEC-Ger are situated closer to the ‘Spoken interactional’ end of the first dimension than those of the reference Info Teens corpus (see Fig. 3). This is the result of texts which, although presented in the form of informative articles in the textbooks, are in fact characterised by numerous features more typical of spontaneous, conversational English. As illustrated in (12), these include contracted verb forms, second-person references, discourse markers, and yes-no questions: (12) The name “soap opera”, or just “soap”, goes back to radio dramas in the 1930s the commercials were for housewives, and they advertised soap, and other cleaning products. Want to be a star? Want to be discovered? Not so fast! Before you can get anywhere, the programme has to “cast” you first. Have you ever been invited to do a casting? You haven’t? Well, TEENBUZZ tells you all about it. Matt Stirling from EastEnders can give you a few tips, too. First, you talk to an agent and give him or her your photo. <TEC-Ger: Green Line 3> Overall, the Fiction subcorpus of the TEC-Ger was found to be most similar to its corresponding reference corpus. In many respects, this finding is easily explained: unlike dialogues and informative texts which are generally especially crafted for pedagogical purposes, many of the narrative texts featured in German EFL textbooks are extracts of published novels and short stories. The analyses merely highlighted the specific nature of beginner level textbook fiction. Excerpt (13) constitutes a representative example of such a text: it relies on present-tense narration and features high frequencies of BE as a main verb and the modal can. By contrast, excerpt (14) stems from a level E (fifth year of secondary education) text that, on both Fig. 3 and Fig. 7, falls within the ellipses of the Youth Fiction corpus: it features many past tense verbs, third-person references, several phrasal verbs, and a higher type/ token ratio. (13) Holly is at home with her two guinea pigs, Mr Fluff and Honey. They live in the kitchen. But they aren’t in the kitchen now. They’re in Holly’s Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 35 room. It’s fun for the guinea pigs on the floor. They can explore everywhere in the room! […] After Olivia’s visit Holly can only see Honey under her bed. <TEC-Ger: Green Line New 1> (14) He ran back to Bill. On the way he picked up a stick. As he came over the hill, he ran at the boar, hitting it again and again. It turned to face Colm. There was blood on its tusks. Bill tried to pull himself away, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Colm raised the stick high and brought it down on the boar’s head. <TEC-Ger: Access G 5> The third dimension to emerge from the present study uncovered more general, cross-register differences between Schulenglisch and extra-curricular English. Some of these echo findings from previous research. For instance, Römer (2004a) reported that the modal would was the second most frequent modal in the Spoken BNC1994, yet only ranked fifth in her conversational textbook data. In the reference conversational data of the present study, would is often used as a marker of politeness. Interestingly, however, the results show that other, in particular, lexical markers of politeness are more typical of Schulenglisch (cf. Limberg 2016a). These are captured here in the POLITE variable (e.g., apologies, please, thank you; see Appendix 2), which makes a strong contribution to the ‘Didactised’ end of the third dimension. Römer (2004a) also concluded that textbooks overrepresent the ‘ability’ function of modals at the detriment of other uses of modal verbs. This corresponds to the strong contribution of the modal can to the ‘Didactised’ pole of the third dimension. Finally, the overrepresentation of WH-questions in textbook dialogues as compared to ‘real-life’ spoken English was also observed by Römer (2005) in the context of progressives. However, given that the syntax of questions often poses problems to EFL learners, textbooks’ over-representation of yes/ no questions and WH-questions (as observed on the third dimension of the present model) can be argued to serve a well-founded pedagogical aim. 6. Conclusion Using a revised multi-feature/ dimensional analysis (MDA) framework, this study analysed textbook-based Schulenglisch across a wide range of lexical, grammatical, and semantic features (see Appendix 2). In doing so, the language of EFL textbooks used in German secondary schools (see 4.1.1) was described along three dimensions of linguistic variation. These dimensions helped to identify significant sources of internal variation within textbookbased Schulenglisch and exposed systematic patterns of similarities and differences between the dialogues, fiction and informative texts of German EFL textbooks and ‘real-life’, extra-curricular English as used in comparable situational contexts (see 4.1.2). Elen Le Foll 36 Whilst some differences may be pedagogically well-founded (e.g., the use of present-tense narration in beginner fictional texts or the over-representation of question forms), other differences - especially those that were found to be persistent across all target proficiency levels - may deprive learners of classroom-based exposure to important features of ‘real-life’ English. The most concerning gap between Schulenglisch and extra-curricular English was observed in representations of conversational English in German EFL textbooks. This is well illustrated by the distribution of texts on the model’s first dimension, where representations of spoken language in Schulenglisch are notably shifted towards the ‘Written informational’ end of the dimension as compared to natural conversation, as well as on the third dimension, on which many textbook dialogues are closer to textbook instructions and explanations than natural conversation. This finding corroborates commonly held lay beliefs about Schulenglisch such as those expressed in excerpts (5) and (15): (15) Wer im Ausland lebt, stellt schnell fest, dass das Schulenglisch der letzten Jahre herzlich wenig mit der Alltagssprache gemein hat. ‘Anyone who lives abroad quickly realises that the school English taught in recent years has precious little in common with everyday language.’ <deTenTen18: auslandsaufenthalt.org> In conclusion, this comparative, multivariate study has provided valuable insights into the nature of Schulenglisch, confirming certain prevalent beliefs regarding its lack of authenticity and limited situational variation. Encouragingly, some of the observed differences between the variety of English taught in German secondary schools and ‘real-life’, extra-curricular English diminish as learners are expected to become more proficient in English. However, it remains evident that Schulenglisch inadequately captures important distinctions between modes and registers, even at more advanced proficiency levels. As young German EFL learners interact more and more with English-medium media in their extra-curricular activities, there is a risk that this observed and perceived gap between Schulenglisch and ‘real-life’ English (further) alienates them from the learning process. It is therefore hoped that this empirical description of Schulenglisch can help raise awareness of the linguistic specificities of Schulenglisch among textbook authors, editors, and teachers and spur on the development of more corpus-based teaching materials (see, e.g., Friginal & Roberts 2022; Le Foll 2021b) and the inclusion of more authentic materials in the EFL classroom. These materials should reflect the contextual nature of language use while facilitating meaningful pedagogical progressions. The incorporation of (adapted) excerpts of published fictional works originally written for purposes other than language learning in German EFL textbooks demonstrates that - with some modifications for lower proficiency levels - Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model 37 this is entirely feasible. Indeed, this study has shown that, in the context of lower secondary school German EFL textbooks, this approach has led to a more accurate representation of fiction than other Schulenglisch registers such as informative writing and, in particular, spoken conversation. Undoubtedly, further empirical research is warranted to investigate the extent to which more accurate representations of language use in different situational contexts can contribute to fostering a more engaging and effective learning experience among secondary school EFL learners. References Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. 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Text types in the Austrian Standardized National School-Leaving Exam for English An empirical study into the perception of the text type constructs by teachers 1 Günther Sigott, Samuel Hafner, Hermann Cesnik, Theresa Weiler, Kristina Leitner, Eva Dousset-Ortner At secondary level, great importance is put in teaching and assessment on the ability to write texts that meet the conventions of text types. For the Austrian school system, descriptions of text types for German, English, French, Italian and Spanish are available. However, the text types differ across languages. This study focuses on English. It uses a set of 23 descriptive statements, derived from text linguistic theory, to empirically investigate their suitability to characterise the constructs held by practicing teachers for eight text types for L2 English. This approach has already been applied to German as the language of instruction (Sigott et al. 2020) and can be applied to all other languages. The results for English show that the suitability of the 23 statements varies considerably across text types. A subset of statements turns out to be suitable as dimensions for comparing all the English text types. In addition, statements are identified which are suitable to characterise individual text types and statements which should not be considered in describing text types and, therefore, not used in formulating assessment criteria. This is valuable information for teaching and relevant for assessment practice. These results are presented in a polarity profile for each text type. 1. Introduction At secondary level, great importance is put on the ability to write texts that meet the conventions of text types. To some extent, this emphasis on text 1 This research was funded by Klagenfurt University, Austria. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2024-0002 Günther Sigott et al. 42 production introduces aspects of genre-based language teaching (Swales 1990; Tardy 2006, 2023; Yasuda 2011; Hyland 2018) and text-based language teaching (Richards & Rodgers 2022) into upper secondary language education. In preparation for the school-leaving exam for English (Standardisierte Reife- und Diplomprüfung (SRDP)) students at upper secondary level in the Austrian school system are faced with definitions of text types for German, English, and some even for French, Italian or Spanish. However, the text types required for German do not correspond neatly to those required for the foreign languages English, French, Italian or Spanish. This is partly due to different educational traditions in the teaching of German and the teaching of the other languages, and partly due to differences in discourse conventions in the languages involved. For details about the provenance of text types for the SRDP see Struger (2018: 163) and Spöttl et al. (2018: 234) Consequently, students are faced with different approaches to defining text types in their language of instruction, German for the vast majority, and their second and third languages. While they are given some support in their effort to understand similarities and differences among text types within each one of their languages, be it German, English, French, Italian or Spanish, they are left to their own devices when it comes to understanding how the German text types relate to those for English, French, Italian or Spanish. This challenge is compounded by the fact that the descriptions of text types as formulated by the Austrian Ministry of Education in the Text Type Characteristics (TTCs) (BMBWF 2019, Appendix) leave room for interpretation. It is almost inevitable that, by their very nature, such documents remain open in several respects, especially due to the tension between reliability of assessment, and authenticity. This can give rise to uncertainties in teaching and to problems of transparency in assessment. This means that both teachers and students are frequently confronted with the challenge of working out for themselves how individual text types differ from, or overlap with, other text types within, and particularly across, their languages. These conceptualisations have not been explored empirically so far. In fact, the challenge of defining criteria which allow sound comparisons among the text types that students are supposed to produce has not been addressed systematically by the teaching profession, the authors of curricular documents, or applied linguists. Defining such criteria, ideally derived from text linguistic theory, which make it possible to compare the text types in all the students’ school languages, therefore seems an urgent requirement. This paper aims to empirically investigate the actual text type constructs held by practicing teachers and to derive recommendations for the practice of teaching and assessment from the results. It builds on a pilot study into German text types (Sigott et al. 2020) and extends its scope to English text types. It uses the same set of descriptive statements, which Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 43 were derived from a literature review of approaches to text type classifications for German. In analogy to the German study, this study seeks to investigate the text type constructs held by practicing teachers of English. It addresses the following research questions: RQ 1: Which statements show sufficient agreement among teachers so that they can be used to characterise a text type? RQ 2: Are there discrepancies between the teachers’ views and the Text Type Characteristics (TTCs)? 2. Text types in the Austrian Standardised National School Leaving Exam for English The Austrian curriculum for foreign languages in academic secondary schools (Allgemeinbildende Höhere Schulen (AHS)) as well as in colleges for higher vocational education (Berufsbildende Höhere Schulen (BHS)) is based on the CEFR. The target level for English, the first foreign language for the vast majority of students, is stipulated as B2. The SRDP - based on the curriculum and hence the CEFR - is a skills-based exam, consisting of three (BHS) or four (AHS) independent exam papers: listening, reading, language in use (AHS only), and writing. This study focuses only on the requirements for the writing part. Academic secondary schools generally focus on broad general education, whereas vocational schools offer a tailored professional education in a certain field. In the SRDP, the specific educational objectives of general and vocational schools are taken into consideration when it comes to assessing writing. Separate writing papers for AHS and BHS with differentiated concepts, and a particular focus on work-related topics in BHS, respond to the demands of the different school types. The test construct of the SRDP is based on the CEFR’s communicative, action-oriented approach to language learning. B2 descriptors of written production and interaction were therefore incorporated in the test specifications of the writing paper in order to cover a range of linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences. The test specifications (BMBWF 2021) list CEFR descriptors from the following CEFR scales (Council of Europe 2001, 2020) • Overall written production • Creative writing • Reports and essays • Overall written interaction • Correspondence • Online conversation and discussion (companion volume) • Explaining data (in graphs, diagrams, etc) (companion volume) Günther Sigott et al. 44 • Expressing a personal response to creative texts (including literature) (companion volume) In line with Glasswell et al. (2001), in the SRDP, the term “text type” is related to the mode of writing and can involve a range of functional purposes. For example, an article may be written to describe, explain, argue or narrate (see Figure 1 and Figure 2 for illustrative examples); it can have various purposes and thus activate a range of register, structure and lexicogrammatical resources. The CEFR outlines functional competence in section 5.2.3.2, listing a number of macrofunctions (e.g., description, narration, argumentation, persuasion) that formed the basis of a pool of speech functions that are used in the test tasks. To be able to cover a range of functions, writing purposes and contexts, various text types are used in the examination. The original text types that were developed and implemented are the essay, article, e-mail and report, as those are represented and explicitly stated in CEFR scales. These text types are internationally often used in language examinations and therefore widely known and well researched. Other text types were added later in order to broaden the construct and to include more authentic writing contexts, doing justice to more recent writing trends. Authenticity is one quality of test usefulness (Bachman & Palmer 1996). Test tasks should be representative of the kind of writing that test-takers are likely to encounter in the target use situation. The added text types were the blog post, blog comment and leaflet. The current text types used in the SRDP are therefore: essay (for AHS only), article, email, blog post, blog comment, report, and leaflet (for BHS only). The leaflet lends itself to testing action-oriented language use in work-related contexts and therefore shows higher face validity for BHS than for AHS. The essay, on the other hand, requires the candidates to reflect on, and discuss, topics of general knowledge in a longer piece of writing as the set word length for essays is 400. Essay writing was therefore found to have more face validity in AHS with its focus on general education. Test-takers are required to write either two or three texts; one of 250 words and one of 400 words at AHS or three texts of 250 words each at BHS (see Table 1). School types and text length Text type AHS BHS essay 400 article 250 / 400 250 Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 45 blog post, blog comment 250 / 400 250 report 250 / 400 250 e-mail 250 250 leaflet 250 Table 1. Text types, school types and text length. As to task development, all test tasks are produced by experienced teachers, who work in the different school types and have been trained as item writers. The tasks go through a number of quality control procedures (field trial, standard setting, post-test analysis). Each test task consists of a prompt and instructions. The prompt defines the text type, sets the situational context, including an authentic situation, the role of the text-taker, the purpose of writing, the readership/ addressee and a stimulus (text-based or visual input). Three content points specifying required speech functions guide the test-takers through the writing task, as can be seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Figure 1. Article for AHS, © BMBWF. Günther Sigott et al. 46 Figure 2. Article for HLFS (Colleges of Agriculture and Forestry), © BMBWF. The SRDP test papers are marked by the class teachers. A standardised analytic assessment scale was developed, consisting of four criteria (task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical and structural range, lexical and structural accuracy) and 10 bands, band 6 describing the threshold for B2.The individual text type characteristics (TTCs) are outlined in the document “Übersicht Charakteristika Textsorten lebende Fremdsprachen (SRDP),” which is available for students and teachers (BMBWF 2019). The document intends to give guidance to teachers and students in their preparation for the SRDP, but is neither prescriptive nor does it provide extensive theoretical descriptions of the text types. The following paragraphs briefly describe the text types as presented in the TTCs (see Appendix). Essay According to the TTCs, an essay is a piece of writing in which a topic is discussed and arguments are developed. The writer takes a position on a topic or question, provides arguments for their point of view, trying to convince the reader. They may also discuss different points of view. In the argumentation, the writer underpins the arguments with examples or explanations. Essay tasks in the SRDP consist of instructions and a prompt that provides a reason to write ((controversial) question or quote), as well as three Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 47 content points. The essay’s main functions as defined for the SDRP are to convince the readership of a point of view on a particular topic or to present a balanced analysis of a topic. Compared to other text types, essays have a more clearly specified structure that should be followed. An essay consists of three main parts: introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction establishes the context, outlines the topic and presents the thesis statement. In the body, the writer develops arguments (and counter-arguments) in relation to the thesis statement. Each paragraph starts with a topic sentence that presents the argument of the paragraph, which is then supported by examples and explanations. In the conclusion, the author answers the initial question, evaluates the thesis statement and summarises their point of view. The tone is formal or neutral. Article An article is a piece of writing that seeks to inform, entertain, explain, narrate or convince. It is written to be published, usually in a newspaper or a magazine and with a specific readership in mind. An article can be written in different styles and registers; hence, it can be serious or amusing. The author holds the readers’ attention by including descriptions, anecdotes, examples or personal opinions when appropriate, and by using expressive language. The author wants to involve the reader; therefore, rhetorical questions, imperatives or exclamations can be used as stylistic features. The readers may also be directly addressed. In the SRDP, candidates are supposed to provide an interesting and catchy title for their article. Ideas are organised into different paragraphs and are followed by a conclusion that can either summarise, encourage action or offer something to think about. Report A report is an informative text that aims to analyse different topics objectively with a specific purpose and readership in mind. It presents facts about events or projects for decision-makers. The prompt of report tasks in the SRDP often includes visual input such as statistics or graphs. The written performances are supposed to be divided into sections with one paragraph per content point, with the candidate having to provide a heading for each section. A short introduction states the purpose of writing the report. This is usually followed by information on the data collected and the presentation of the findings and can include an analysis and interpretation. It can end with a recommendation of specific actions to be taken. A report is written in a clear, factual and precise style as its aim is to communicate facts. The register is formal or neutral, depending on the target readership. Günther Sigott et al. 48 Blog post / blog comment A blog is an interactive webpage that allows publishing texts online as well as interacting with the readership. As blogs are posted online, they can reach a wider readership that is not as clearly defined as with more traditional forms of published writing (e.g. articles in a newspaper or a journal). Similarly to articles, blogs often seek to inform or entertain. In the SRDP, while blog posts usually start a new topic and the blogger shares an opinion on a particular subject, gives advice or offers recommendations, the blog comment requires candidates to react to a previous post, hence adding an element of interaction to the writing process. The person writing the comment may express their opinion on a given topic, give advice, make suggestions or narrate a personal anecdote relating to the previous input. E-mail An e-mail is a digital message directly addressed to one or several persons in a private or occupational context. It can cover a wide range of language functions. Its purpose can range from giving or asking for information to giving advice or help and complaining. In a vocational context, it can also deal with a business case. The register is formal, neutral or personal, depending on the target readership. In the SRDP, candidates are required to state the addressee, the sender, the date and the subject, which refers to the content of the e-mail. A salutation directly addresses the reader followed by stating the purpose of the e-mail. The body is divided into three paragraphs, one per content point. Candidates are supposed to sign off using an appropriate closing phrase. Leaflet Leaflets are mainly used as a medium for marketing. They may promote products or companies and enhance customer relations. Leaflets seek to advertise or to inform a target group about, for example, a new product or event. They used to be distributed in print, but are increasingly published online as well. Leaflets contain pictures, illustrations or logos that are meant to involve the reader emotionally and to convey some of the corporate identity of the company. The language of leaflets typically contains features of advertising language, is descriptive or persuasive. It can contain some humour or may surprise the reader in order to catch their attention. Leaflets need to be designed in such a way as to leave an impression on the reader. Leaflets can be used by individuals, companies, corporates or organizations in order to: Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 49 • advertise products and services • recruit new members • promote an event • inform an audience about a new project • convince or share an opinion Candidates of the SRDP do not need to design a leaflet, but they are required to provide the text for one. In summary, the tasks designed for the SRDP aim to cover a range of writing functions and topics through different text types. For the present empirical study, the teachers’ perceptions of the text types as described above were analysed. In the following section, the methodology of the study is described. 3. Research design The present study is part of a project on text types that comprises two phases. In the first phase, which is the subject of this study, the focus is on practicing teachers’ text type knowledge. The second phase focuses on teachers’ perception of text type characteristics in written student performances. As stated in section 1, in the current study the following research questions are addressed. RQ 1: Which statements show sufficient agreement among teachers so that they can be used to characterise a text type? RQ 2: Are there discrepancies between the teachers’ views and the Text Type Characteristics (TTCs)? 3.1. Data collection method In order to explore practicing teachers’ understanding and knowledge of the different text types, a questionnaire, originally developed for German, with a set of characterising statements was used. In this instrument, teachers are asked to characterise the text types in the Austrian SRDP for English by means of a 5-point Likert scale for each of the questionnaire items. The questionnaire, which is formulated in German, comprises 23 items (see Appendix). The first 19 items were taken from the questionnaire developed in Sigott et al. (2020). In that study, the focus was on the text types in the Austrian SRDP for German as a subject. We derived 19 potential criteria in the form of statements using theoretical approaches as well as text type definitions, asking practicing teachers of German to express their degree of consent to each statement on a 5-point Likert scale. Given the task of describing educational text types, criteria were derived from tradi- Günther Sigott et al. 50 tional text linguistic approaches which seem particularly suitable for describing and investigating the SRDP text types (cf. Sandig 1972; Werlich 1975; Große 1976; Sowinski 1978; van Dijk 1980; Brinker 1985; Heinemann & Viehweger 1991; Heinemann 2011; Krieg-Holz 2017). From this basis we derived 19 criteria in the form of statements. They are inspired by the speech/ writing acts characteristic of individual text types as well as by other diverse criteria for classifying text types. Statements that refer to the surface structure of the texts focus on specific grammatical and lexical features such as markers of coherence (statement 1), specific lexical elements (statement 2), or expressive and/ or emotional expressions (statement 3). Like statement 8 (“The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices”), they focus on aspects of style. Statement 6 and 7 address text patterns at the macro level. External conditions of communication are mirrored in statements about the communicative situation, e.g. public communication (statement 4), and reference to the addressee (statement 5). All other statements (9-19) are inspired by text function and speech/ writing acts (e.g. informing, appealing, narrating and argumentation). In order to make the results comparable with the study on German and possible future studies for different languages in the school-leaving exam (e.g., French, Italian and Spanish), we decided to use the same statements in the same language, namely German. Translating could change the meaning of the items slightly, thus making comparisons more difficult. However, after carrying out a content analysis of the TTCs (for details see section 4), we added four statements (20 to 23) in order to ensure complete coverage of the TTCs in the questionnaire. The statements in their German version as well as their English translation can be found in the Appendix. Respondents specified their level of consent to each statement on a symmetric agree-disagree scale, in analogy to the German study. Symmetry means that there is an equal number of positions around the ‘neutral’ value. The 5-point Likert scale ranges from ‘disagree’ (0), ‘partly disagree’ (1), ‘neutral’ (2), ‘partly agree’ (3) to ‘agree’ (4). The number of text types differs from the official number as described in the official text type characteristics, which specify 6 text types, namely essay, leaflet, article, report, blog, and e-mail. Because the structure of emails differs fundamentally depending on the degree of formality, we decided to split e-mails into informal and formal e-mails, the more so because this distinction seems already to be beginning to be made in teacher training. Due to the different discourse functions (statement/ question reply) of the blog post and the blog comment we also split the blog into two separate text types. For each of the 8 text types, namely essay (only AHS), leaflet (only BHS), article, report, blog post, blog comment, formal e-mail, and informal e-mail, teachers were asked to respond to each of the 23 statements. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 51 3.2. Participants In order to reach the target audience, an online survey based on the questionnaire was created. In 2021, the link to the online survey was sent to the Boards of Education (Bildungsdirektionen) for Carinthia, Styria and Salzburg. They forwarded unique personal links to experienced teachers who actively taught English at upper secondary level in AHS or BHS in Austria. Out of a total of 130 teachers who expressed an interest in participating, 75 teachers filled out the survey completely (response rate 58%); 64% (n=48) came from AHS, 36% (n=27) from BHS. 3.3. Analysis Two statistical measures are used in this research, namely sample mean (M) and sample standard deviation (SD). M is used to represent the raters’ average consent to the characterising statements. SD is used as a straightforward index of interrater agreement. Potential outliers are part of the range of teachers’ perceptions of text types. Since this is a main focus of the study, no attempt was made to identify and remove them from the data. Both measures are graphically represented in polarity profiles to show the distribution of response patterns and the heteroand homogeneity of the respondents’ evaluations (see Figure 3). 4. Results and Discussion 4.1. Definingness of statements and their relation to the Text Type Characteristics (TTCs) The 23 statements in the questionnaire were put into three categories according to the amount of agreement reached by the teachers in indicating their consent. This agreement is here referred to as definingness. The definingness of statements is defined with regard to the values of the standard deviations. Statements with an SD smaller than 0.7 (SD < 0.7) are termed highly defining, those with an SD between 0.7 and 1.3 (0.7 ≤ SD ≤ 1.3) are referred to as defining, and those with an SD greater than 1.3 (SD > 1.3) are considered non-defining. Table 2 displays the results and provides four levels of information. Level 1 The first level consists of the values for the means and the SDs of the ratings for each text type and each statement. The ratings range from 0 to 4 with 0 meaning ‘disagree’, 1 ‘partly disagree’, 2 ‘neutral’, 3 ‘partly agree’ and 4 ‘agree’. Günther Sigott et al. 52 Level 2 The second level indicates the degree of definingness of the statements. The cells containing the SDs for highly defining statements are not shaded, those for defining statements are light grey, and those for non-defining statements are coloured dark grey. Level 3 The third level marks those statements for which there is a conceptual match in the TTCs. This constitutes the basis for formulating expectations for values of means and SDs. Decisions as to whether a conceptual match is present were made on the basis of a content analysis (Mayring 2015) by two researchers comparing each statement with the TTCs and reaching negotiated consent. In this semantic analysis, an attempt was made to identify propositional matches between each statement and the formulations in the TTCs for each text type. After adding statements 20 to 23 it was found that the TTCs no longer contained substantial information that was not addressed by the statements. The content analysis yielded four different categories: • The statement is clearly supported by the formulation in the TTCs. E.g., leaflet: The text is intended for public communication (statement 4) - Werbung machen; die Leserschaft informieren (advertise; inform the readership) (TTCs). • The statement is contradicted by the formulation in the TTCs. E.g., informal e-mail: The text is intended for public communication (statement 4) - eine bestimmte Person oder Personengruppe; Empfänger/ in wird direkt angesprochen (a specific person or group of people; the reader is addressed directly) (TTCs). • The statement is neither clearly supported nor clearly contradicted by the formulation in the TTCs. Here the TTCs allow for so much leeway that a support/ contradict decision cannot be made. E.g., leaflet: The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed (statement 5) - mögliche Interessentinnen/ Interessenten; Leser/ innen können direkt angesprochen werden (potentially interested parties; readers can be addressed directly) (TTCs). • The statement has no obvious correspondence in the TTCs. These categories are visualised in Table 2 by different frames: • A bold dashed frame (- -) means that the statement is clearly supported by the TTCs. • A bold dash dot dot frame (- ▪ ▪ ) means the statement is clearly contradicted by the TTCs. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 53 • A bold frame (--) marks statements which, while conceptually matched, are neither clearly supported nor clearly contradicted by the TTCs. • Statements which are not framed have no obvious correspondence in the TTC. The degree to which the TTCs support, contradict, or are neutral with regard to each statement constitutes the basis for expectations for values of means and SDs. No expectations can be formulated for statements which have no correspondence in the TTCs. Level 4 The fourth level indicates the extent to which these expectations are met by the questionnaire data. For statements for which the data meet the expectations, the values are centred and bold. The expectations are as follows. • Statements which are clearly supported by the TTCs (- -) are expected to be at least defining (SD ≤ 1.3) with a mean above 3 (M > 3). • Statements which are clearly contradicted by the TTCs (- ▪ ▪ ) are expected to be at least defining (SD ≤ 1.3) with a mean below 1 (M < 1). • Statements which are neither clearly supported nor clearly contradicted by the TTCs (--) are expected to be non-defining (SD > 1.3) and/ or have a mean between 1 and 3 (1 ≤ M ≤ 3) All measures displayed in Table 2 are also displayed graphically in Figure 3. Two types of agreement measures for each text type can be seen in Figure 3. The bold line shows the average degree of consent (mean) of all raters/ teachers to the specific statement for each text type. A value of 0 represents total disagreement with, and a value of 4 represents total consent to the specific statement. The symmetric slim lines around the mean show one standard deviation in each direction and can be interpreted as a measure of the interrater agreement in the specific statement. The narrower the distance between these lines around the mean, the higher the interrater agreement and vice versa. Günther Sigott et al. 54 Table 2. Means and standard deviations for statements per text type. essay leaflet article report blog post blog comment formal email informal e-mail Mean 3,73 2,52 3,60 3,37 2,68 2,63 3,61 2,36 SD 0,68 0,98 0,72 0,94 1,10 1,17 0,71 1,09 Mean 2,98 2,56 2,89 3,72 1,37 1,41 3,20 0,80 SD 0,98 0,89 0,97 0,53 0,83 0,95 0,99 0,75 Mean 1,42 3,19 2,36 0,44 3,63 3,52 0,67 3,67 SD 1,15 0,88 1,25 0,76 0,54 0,60 0,72 0,58 Mean 2,42 3,85 3,80 1,88 3,79 3,63 1,32 0,41 SD 1,27 0,36 0,46 1,41 0,55 0,61 1,49 0,81 Mean 0,92 2,85 2,39 3,57 2,87 3,73 3,97 3,93 SD 0,92 1,43 1,25 0,92 1,20 0,50 0,16 0,25 Mean 3,73 3,70 3,53 3,96 2,25 2,28 3,83 2,35 SD 0,61 0,61 0,64 0,20 1,18 1,19 0,45 1,10 Mean 3,27 3,30 3,05 3,77 2,25 2,27 3,68 2,33 SD 0,89 0,99 1,08 0,63 1,22 1,15 0,60 1,09 Mean 2,73 3,41 3,01 2,57 2,21 2,20 2,89 1,73 SD 1,22 0,69 1,02 1,25 1,33 1,23 1,12 1,08 Mean 3,13 1,85 2,53 1,39 3,68 3,84 1,92 2,83 SD 0,89 1,26 1,13 1,10 0,55 0,44 1,01 0,79 Mean 2,75 3,07 2,80 1,52 3,20 3,43 1,57 1,81 SD 1,28 1,14 1,04 1,13 0,89 0,81 1,09 0,95 Mean 1,15 2,41 2,75 0,15 3,43 2,84 0,27 2,35 SD 1,05 1,12 1,24 0,36 0,79 1,01 0,53 1,05 Mean 0,71 1,22 2,00 0,43 2,91 2,28 0,89 2,81 SD 0,82 1,01 1,15 0,74 1,03 0,94 1,16 0,88 Mean 3,10 3,30 2,80 3,57 2,36 2,48 2,75 2,24 SD 0,95 0,95 0,94 0,64 0,92 0,94 0,93 0,91 Mean 3,85 2,33 3,03 2,37 2,29 3,08 2,57 1,83 SD 0,41 1,27 0,90 1,33 1,05 0,88 0,92 0,91 Mean 2,79 2,04 2,49 2,51 2,56 3,05 1,88 1,84 SD 1,13 1,32 1,03 1,44 0,96 0,84 1,16 0,92 Mean 2,17 3,15 2,71 1,53 2,77 2,75 2,15 1,84 SD 1,29 1,13 1,12 1,23 0,86 0,93 1,06 0,92 Mean 2,71 3,26 2,96 3,23 2,76 2,40 2,39 2,51 SD 1,03 0,71 0,83 1,06 0,98 0,97 1,05 0,79 Mean 3,08 3,78 3,41 3,73 2,83 2,31 2,97 2,45 SD 0,68 0,51 0,68 0,50 0,76 0,87 0,96 0,87 Mean 3,00 1,19 2,68 2,81 1,99 2,40 1,80 1,53 SD 1,17 1,00 1,09 1,17 0,97 1,05 1,12 0,81 Mean 2,69 1,30 2,15 2,73 1,76 2,28 1,41 1,55 SD 1,11 0,95 1,15 1,17 0,85 0,97 0,92 0,83 Mean 0,67 3,59 2,76 1,23 3,68 3,51 3,49 3,77 SD 0,95 0,64 1,20 1,20 0,62 0,79 1,08 0,69 Mean 2,21 3,96 3,53 1,15 3,64 3,40 1,87 1,79 SD 1,32 0,19 0,88 1,10 0,63 0,75 1,26 1,29 Mean 2,29 3,63 3,79 1,20 3,73 3,33 0,59 0,29 SD 1,34 0,79 0,44 1,23 0,64 0,83 0,93 0,65 23 The text is written to be read by a wider audience. 22 The text is meant to attract attention. 21 The reader is addressed directly. 20 The text makes comparisons. 19 The text summarises / recapitulates. 18 The text serves to inform. 17 The text is descriptive. 16 The text is appelative. 15 The text is evaluative. 14 The text is argumentative. 13 The text is explanatory. 12 The text is narrative. 11 The text is meant to entertain. 10 The text aims to shape opinion / wants to persuade. 9 The text expresses an opinion. 8 The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices. 7 The text follows a common text pattern. 1 The text contains explicit markers of cohesion and coherence indicated by conjunctions, adverbs, etc. Text type Statements 6 The text has a clear structure. 5 The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed. 4 The text is intended for public communication. 3 The text contains expressive or emotional expressions. 2 The text contains technical terms. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 55 Figure 3. Text type profiles. Günther Sigott et al. 56 4.2. Description of all text types In the following sections the eight text types are described and discussed in the light of the empirical findings. • Each section starts by identifying the highly defining statements. Then those highly defining statements are discussed which meet the expectations suggested by the TTCs. This is followed by a discussion of the highly defining statements which contradict the expectations. • Next, as far as the defining statements are concerned, only those which do not meet expectations are focussed on. • Finally, the non-defining statements are mentioned and those which run counter to the expectations are reviewed. Ideally, all 23 statements should be highly defining for all text types. • Given the only minor differences between the results for AHS and BHS, we did not differentiate between the two school types in the description. 4.2.1. Essay For the essay, 17 statements turn out to be defining, four highly defining, and two non-defining. The highly defining statements are 1, 6, 14 and 18. As expressed by statement 1, teachers apparently agree on the importance of explicitly marking cohesion and coherence in essays. Judging from the results for statement 6, teachers also agree strongly on the necessity of a clear structure. Statements 14 and 18 show that there is also strong agreement regarding the argumentative and informative nature of the essay. Among the highly defining statements, statements 6, 14, and 18 are clearly in line with expectations suggested by the TTCs. For statement 6 (The text has a clear structure.) this is also mirrored in the results with a mean value of 3.73. The marking of coherence figures prominently in the TTCs for the essay. Requirements for ensuring coherence within paragraphs are mentioned by highlighting topic sentence and supporting detail. At the level of the text, title, introduction, main body, and conclusion are explicitly mentioned. The mean value of 3.85 for statement 14 (The text is argumentative.) and 3.08 for statement 18 (The text serves to inform.) are in line with our expectations. This is also highlighted in the TTCs, which specifically mention arguments as important elements of an essay and refer to informing as one of the main text functions of the essay. As for the defining statements, the data show that five statements, namely statements 4 (The text is intended for public communication.), 8 (The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices.), 10 (The text aims to shape opinion / wants to persuade.), 17 (The text is descriptive.), and 20 (The text makes comparisons.), run counter to what we Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 57 expected given the information the TTCs provide. The TTCs define a restricted audience by mentioning a jury and the teacher in the school context, which is contradicted by a mean of 2.42. Similarly, although the TTCs mention, e.g., that the essay should not contain contractions or address the reader directly, there was no clear consensus among teachers, as indicated by the mean of 2.73. The text functions of persuading/ convincing, describing, and comparing, expressed by statements 10, 17, and 20, are clearly referred to in the TTCs, but this is not mirrored in the results as indicated by the mean values of 2.75, 2.71, and 2.69 respectively. Statements 22 (The text is meant to attract attention.) and 23 (The text is written to be read by a wider audience.) turn out to be non-defining (SD of 1.32 and 1.34 respectively), meaning that teachers disagree as to whether an essay is written to either attract attention or to be read by a wider audience. While statement 23 has a conceptual match in the TTCs, the mean value of 2.29 contradicts expectations. 4.2.2. Leaflet As for the text type leaflet, 21 statements can be classified as at least defining, six of which are highly defining (statements 4, 6, 8, 18, 21, and 22). Teachers seem to strongly agree that the leaflet is part of communication to the public, has a clear structure and features a particular style and rhetorical devices. Additionally, there is consensus that the text serves to inform, the reader is addressed directly, and the purpose of the text is to attract attention. The level of agreement for statement 22 (The text is meant to attract attention.) is even almost perfect (M = 3.96, SD = 0.19), meaning that teachers nearly unanimously agree that a leaflet should stand out and be noticeable. All of the highly defining statements have a conceptual match with the TTCs, but not all meet our expectations for mean values. The formulations in the TTCs resonate with the results for statements 4, 6, 8, 18, and 22, but not 21. The mean values of 3.85 for statement 4 (The text is intended for public communication.) and 3.7 for statement 6 (The text has a clear structure.) are in accordance with the definition of the leaflet as being advertising or information material distributed to a target group and showing a clear structure with some optional elements. The high mean values for statements 8 (The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices.), 18 (The text serves to inform.) and 22 (The text is meant to attract attention.) of 3.41, 3.78, and 3.96 respectively are also in line with the stipulations of the TTCs, which suggest persuasive language to present content in an informative, interesting and appealing way. Statement 21 (The reader is addressed directly.) with a mean value of 3.59 is the only highly defining statement which is not in accordance with our expectations. In the TTCs, addressing the reader directly is listed as a possible but not mandatory stylistic aspect (‘The reader can be addressed Günther Sigott et al. 58 directly.’). This made us expect a mean value in the middle range (see 4.1, Level 4). However, the teachers do not seem to comply with the intentions of the TTCs, which suggest optionality. Only one of the defining statements with a conceptual match with the TTCs runs counter to our expectations, namely statement 17 (The text is descriptive.). With a mean value of 3.26 and SD of 0.71, teachers feel that the leaflet should be more descriptive than suggested by the TTCs. Only two statements, namely statements 5 (The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed.) and 15 (The text is evaluative.), turn out to be nondefining (SD of 1.43 and 1.32 respectively). Apparently, teachers are in disagreement about whether it is necessary to clearly define to whom the leaflet is addressed or whether this text type should be evaluative or not. The results for statement 5, which has a conceptual match in the TTCs, fulfil our expectations. By contrast, statement 15 does not have a conceptual match in the TTCs, so that no expectations could be formulated. 4.2.3. Article As for the text type article, all 23 statements can be classified as at least defining, 4 of which are highly defining, namely statements 4, 6, 18, and 23. Teachers strongly agree that the article is meant for public communication and should be read by a wider audience. Additionally, this text type should, according to the teachers, have a clear structure and inform the readers. All of the highly defining statements are clearly supported by the TTCs and the results meet our expectations. As the TTCs describe the article as part of a book or other publication, such as a magazine or newspaper, the high mean values for statement 4 (The text is intended for public communication.) and statement 23 (The text is written to be read by a wider audience.) are in accordance with this description (M = 3.80 and 3.79 respectively). The mean value of 3.05 for statement 6 (The text has a clear structure.) is also in line with the detailed requirements for layout and structure in the TTCs. Additionally, the high mean value of 3.41 for statement 18 (The text serves to inform.) is echoed in the description of the article in the TTCs, which mention informing as one of the functions of this text type. Among the defining statements which have a conceptual match with the TTCs, four contradict our expectations suggested by the TTCs. Statements 10 (The text aims to shape opinion / wants to persuade.) and 11 (The text is meant to entertain.) are clearly supported by the TTCs, but with mean values of 2.80 and 2.75 are not in line with what we expected. Apparently, teachers do not seem to perceive the persuasive and entertaining function of the article as strongly as the TTCs define it. Although the TTCs do not clearly support statements 8 (The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices.) or 14 (The text is argumentative.), teachers feel that the Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 59 article should feature a particular style and rhetorical devices and be argumentative, as indicated by the mean values of 3.01 and 3.03 respectively. In the TTCs, the stylistic properties of the article are expressed as optionalities rather than prescriptions (‘Rhetorical questions can be used; the reader can be addressed directly…’). This made us expect a mean value in the middle range (see 4.1, Level 4). However, the teachers do not seem to comply with the intentions of the TTCs, which suggest optionality. Statement 14 (The text is argumentative.) is only indirectly addressed by the TTCs (informing, persuading, entertaining, captivating). This again made us expect a mean value in the middle range, while the teachers do see the article as an argumentative text. 4.2.4. Report For the report, 20 statements can be classified as at least defining, six of which are highly defining, namely statements 2, 6, 7, 11, 13, and 18. Based on the low SDs and the high mean values for statements 2, 6 and 7, it becomes clear that teachers strongly agree that a report contains technical terms, has a clear structure and is written according to a common text pattern. Teachers also strongly agree that this text type should contain explanatory elements as well as inform the readership, as the results for statements 13 and 18 indicate. According to the low mean for statement 11, there is consensus among teachers that the function of a report is not to entertain. Among the highly defining statements, three have a conceptual match with the TTCs, namely 6, 7 and 18. All of them also meet our expectations based on the TTCs. Since the TTCs list detailed requirements for layout and structure, the high mean values for statement 6 (The text has a clear structure.) and statement 7 (The text follows a common text pattern.) come as no surprise. The high mean value of 3.41 for statement 18 (The text serves to inform.) can be expected given that the TTCs define the report as an account of a state of affairs in the form of an (official) document after investigation or consideration by a designated person or group of persons. Among the defining statements which can be linked to the TTCs, three contradict our expectations, namely 8, 12, and 23. Although the TTCs stipulate that the report should not contain contractions, be objective, factual, and concise, teachers did not feel that the report features a particular style, as indicated by the mean value of 2.57 for statement 8 (The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices.). The mean value of 1.20 for statement 23 (The text is written to be read by a wider audience.), does not confirm expectations as the TTCs define a very restricted audience in the form of a decision maker, e.g., a supervisor or an institution. Although the value is close to the threshold of a mean value of 1 for ‘confirmed’, teachers do not see the restriction of the audience as clearly as the TTCs suggest. This is also mirrored in the SD of 1.23 which approaches the upper limit Günther Sigott et al. 60 for defining statements. The mean value of 0.43 for statement 12 (The text is narrative.) could be seen as surprising. Evidently, teachers feel that the report is not narrative at all, while the TTCs suggest the report to be a written account of facts, events, projects, or research, suggesting a chronological structure, which in turn suggests a potentially narrative aspect of this text type. Apparently the teachers have a more narrowly defined, and arguably more technically accurate, understanding of the term “narrative” than the TTCs, relating it to a story with plot and characters. Three statements, namely statements 4 (The text is intended for public communication.), 14 (The text is argumentative.) and 15 (The text is evaluative.), turn out to be non-defining (SD of 1.41, 1.33, and 1.44 respectively). Possibly, due to task-dependent features, teachers disagree whether the report is intended for public communication, and whether this text type is argumentative or evaluative. All of these statements have a conceptual match with the TTCs, but only statement 4 contradicts expectations. Although teachers could not agree whether the report is intended for public communication (M = 1.88), the TTCs specifically mention a superior as an example for the intended audience, suggesting a restricted audience. We would have expected a lower mean and less disagreement. 4.2.5. Blog post / blog comment Blog post and blog comment have similar profiles, as can be seen in Figure 3. For both blog types, statements 3, 4 and 9 are highly defining, given the low values for the SDs. This, in combination with the high mean values (all greater than 3.5), indicates that teachers tend to agree strongly that blogs use expressive or emotional language, are intended for public communication, and express an opinion. For the blog post, also statements 21, 22 and 23 qualify as highly defining. In combination with the high mean values for these statements (all greater than 3.6), this indicates teachers’ agreement that blog posts address the reader directly, are meant to attract attention and are supposed to be read by a wider audience (cf. also the values for statement 4 above). The high mean values of 3.79 and 3.63 for statement 4 (The text is intended for public communication.) can be seen in line with the audience stipulated in the TTCs, which mention friends but also like-minded people, customers, co-workers and business partners. The high mean values of 3.68 and 3.84 for statement 9 (The text expresses an opinion.) for both blog types also tally with the TTCs, where expressing opinions is explicitly listed among the functions of blogs. For the blog post the high mean value of 3.68 for statement 21 (The reader is addressed directly.) is in line with the TTCs, where addressing the readership directly is listed under stylistic aspects. Also the high mean value of 3.64 for statement 22 (The text is meant to attract attention.) is echoed in the TTCs, which describe drawing attention to a company and Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 61 promoting its image as functions of blogs. Like for statement 4, the high mean value of 3.73 for statement 23 (The text is written to be read by a wider audience.) is also in accordance with the readership described in the TTCs. For both blog types, it is worth noting that the relatively clear structure described for blogs in the TTCs is, however, not mirrored prominently in the mean values around 2.3 for statement 6 (The text has a clear structure.) and for statement 7 (The text follows a common text pattern.). Apparently the teachers are basing their judgement on real “blogs in the wild” rather than the “blog” defined for educational purposes in the TTCs. While the TTCs do list reporting experiences among the text functions, the mean values of 2.91 and 2.28 for statement 12 (The text is narrative.) for the two blog types are lower than one would expect on the basis of the TTCs. Also the relatively low means of 2.83 and 2.31 for statement 18 (The text serves to inform.) contradict expectations suggested in the TTCs, which list informing among the functions for both blog types. For the blog post, also the mean value of 2.87 for statement 5 (The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed.) contradicts expectations suggested by the TTCs, which define a clear audience. Only one statement, namely statement 8 (The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices.), turns out as non-defining for the blog post (SD = 1.33), and with an SD of 1.23 also approaches the upper limit for defining statements for the blog comment. Apparently, teachers disagree with regard to stylistic conventions required for blogs, more so for the blog post than for the blog comment. This is in line with the TTCs, which claim that the style of blogs is dependent on the content and the readership. This is a non-characteristic feature, which cannot be used for characterising blogs. All other statements fall within the range (0.7 ≤ SD ≤ 1.3) for defining statements. 4.2.6. E-mail For both e-mail types only statement 5 with mean values of 3.97 and 3.93 is highly defining. Apparently, teachers strongly agree that e-mails should identify the addressee clearly. For the formal e-mail statements 6, 7 and 11 are highly defining. In combination with the high mean values of 3.83 and 3.68 for statements 6 and 7, it becomes clear that teachers strongly agree that a formal e-mail should have a clear structure and follow a common text pattern. Teachers also strongly agree that the function of a formal email is not to entertain, as becomes obvious from the low mean value of 0.27 for statement 11. For the informal e-mail, statements 3, 21 and 23 are highly defining. In combination with the high mean values of 3.67 and 3.77 for statements 3 and 21 this shows that teachers strongly agree that informal e-mails contain expressive or emotional language and address the reader directly. By contrast, the low mean value of 0.29 for statement 23 Günther Sigott et al. 62 indicates that teachers are in strong agreement that informal e-mails are not written to be read by a wider audience. For both e-mail types, statement 5 (The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed.) reaches high mean values of 3.97 and 3.93. This is in line with the expectations suggested by the TTCs, which call for a strictly defined readership for e-mails. For the formal e-mail the high mean values of 3.83 and 3.68 for statement 6 (The text has a clear structure.) and statement 7 (The text follows a common text pattern.) are in line with the expectations suggested by the detailed stipulations for Layout and Structure in the TTCs. For the informal e-mail the high mean value of 3.77 for statement 21 (The reader is addressed directly.) confirms the expectations resulting from the stylistic aspect for the informal e-mail in the TTCs, which call for the recipient to be addressed directly. The low mean value of 0.29 for statement 23 (The text is written to be read by a wider audience.) shows that teachers agree that the audience for informal e-mails is restricted. For both e-mail types the formulations for text function in the TTCs resonate with statements 16 (The text is appellative.) and 18 (The text serves to inform.), but are contradicted by the mean values of 2.15 and 2.97 for the formal e-mail and 1.84 and 2.45 for the informal e-mail. Apparently, teachers feel that e-mails are not strongly appellative, and their informative function is somewhat weaker than one might expect on the basis of the speech functions listed in the TTCs. For the informal e-mails statement 6 and 7 show lower mean values of 2.35 and 2.33, suggesting that teachers feel the text structure for informal e-mails is less strictly defined than the TTCs suggest. Only statement 4 (The text is intended for public communication.) turns out to be non-defining for the formal e-mail. With SD at 1.49, teachers tend to disagree as to whether formal e-mails are intended for public communication. This contradicts expectations suggested by the TTCs, where the readership is described as a particular person or group of persons. One would expect more unanimity among teachers that formal e-mails are not intended for public communication. 5. Conclusion This study examined whether the 23 statements in the questionnaire are suitable for describing the text types used in the SRDP. These statements were derived from the literature on text type definitions for German. In addition, the study examined how teachers’ views, as measured by their degree of consent to the 23 statements, correspond to the descriptions of text types as outlined in the TTCs. Since the sample cannot be claimed to be representative of the entire Austrian teacher population, conclusions from the study need to be considered with circumspection. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 63 With regard to RQ 1 (Which statements show sufficient agreement among teachers so that they can be used to characterise a text type? ), the study has shown that the suitability of the 23 statements varies considerably across text types. While none of the 23 statements has turned out to be highly defining for all the eight text types, only six statements (10, 12, 16, 17, 19 and 20) qualify as defining for all text types. These six statements could function as dimensions for comparing all the eight text types, an insight which seems very valuable for teaching practice. The variation in relevance of the 23 statements does not, however, detract from the usefulness of the statements for characterising individual text types. On the one hand, prominent characteristic features of individual text types can be identified by inspecting the statements that are highly defining or defining for individual text types in Table 2. On the other hand, statements that turned out to be non-defining for individual text types identify features that should not be focused on either in teaching or in assessment. This, too, can be valuable information for teaching practice. Before examining the correspondence between teachers’ views and the official text type descriptions, which is the focus of RQ 2, the conceptual overlap between the 23 statements and the official descriptions of text types in the TTCs needed to be determined through content analysis. While three of the 23 statements do not have a conceptual match in the TTCs for any of the text types, six statements show a conceptual match for all eight text types. These are 4 (The text is intended for public communication.), 6 (The text has a clear structure.), 8 (The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices.), 17 (The text is descriptive.), 18 (The text serves to inform.), and 23 (The text is written to be read by a wider audience.). Each of the remaining statements show a conceptual match for at least one text type. This indicates a fair amount of conceptual overlap between the set of statements and the TTCs. It is, however, important to remember that a conceptual match does not indicate agreement or disagreement but constitutes a precondition for making decisions on whether a statement agrees or disagrees with the TTCs. Out of a theoretically possible 184 (23 x 8) instances of conceptual match, there are 104 instances of conceptual match between the questionnaire statements and the individual text type descriptions in the ministry documents (see framed cells in Table 2). Of these 104 instances, 62 represent agreement (bold dashed frame (- -)) between the statements and the TTCs, 10 represent disagreement (bold dash dot dot frame (- ▪ ▪ )), and 32 constitute conceptual matches which do not allow a decision of agreement or disagreement between statements and TTCs (bold frame (--)). On this basis, expectations for teachers’ responses were formulated and confirmed or disconfirmed by the data provided by the teachers. In order to answer RQ 2 (Are there discrepancies between the teachers’ views and the TTCs? ), the correspondence of teachers’ views with the official text type descriptions was examined on the basis of these expectations. Günther Sigott et al. 64 Out of a total of 104 expectations derived from the content analysis, 71 were confirmed and 33 disconfirmed by the teachers’ responses to the statements. Apparently, the teachers agreed with approximately two thirds of the expectations that resulted from a comparison of the statements with the formulations of the TTCs. This does indicate a fair amount of correspondence between the teachers’ views and the official text type characteristics. However, there is also some disagreement between the researchers’ content analysis and the teachers’ views. These cases can easily be identified by examining Table 2 for framed cells in which the values are right aligned and in regular font. For instance, while for the blog post and for the blog comment, according to content analysis, statement 6 (The text has a clear structure.) is supported by the TTCs, the teachers’ responses do not confirm this. This result could be due to the way the TTCs are structured. The document consists of seven categories (general definition, purpose/ function, readership, layout, structure, register, stylistic aspects), each of which is delineated for every text type. However, some categories may be more relevant for certain text types than for others. For example, every text should have a clear structure, but for some text types, e.g. the essay, the structure (introduction with thesis statement, body, conclusion) is more important than for others, e.g. the blog comment. Even if some statements of the questionnaire do not show a conceptual match with the TTCs, this does not mean that they are not relevant for the text types. For example, statement 1 (The text contains explicit markers of cohesion and coherence indicated by conjunctions, adverbs, etc.) does not have obvious correspondence in the TTCs. Still, the teachers thought this statement was relevant for several text types, presumably because coherence and cohesion are part of general writing competence. This can be considered supportive of the validity of the statements. It should be noted that the TTCs are not exhaustive descriptions of the text types but were designed to provide general guidance to teachers and students. 6. Practical implications The results of this study may point to areas that should be focused on more intensively in conceptualising and implementing in-service teacher training. It could be pointed out that highly defining and defining statements, unlike non-defining statements, are reliable bases for describing text types. The means on these statements provide detailed information about text type features. For instance, statement 21 (The reader is addressed directly) is at least defining for the essay and for the informal e-mail and is therefore a reliable basis for characterising the two text types. As the means for the two text types show, they differ considerably with regard to this feature. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 65 The mean of 0.67 indicates teachers’ opinion that an essay should not usually address the reader directly. By contrast, the mean of 3.77 for the informal e-mail expresses teachers’ expectation that the reader will be addressed directly. In this way, detailed text type features can be isolated and focused on in teaching. At the same time, these findings can give rise to sharpening some of the formulations in the current text type characteristics. For instance, for the leaflet, statement 21 (The reader is addressed directly) shows a mean of 3.59. This indicates that teachers expect the reader to be addressed directly in a leaflet. However the formulation in the TTCs leaves this entirely open by suggesting that the reader may be addressed directly. This discrepancy could be resolved by changing may be addressed directly to should be addressed directly. If the TTCs are not changed, then such discrepancies will need to be addressed in teacher training in order to initiate changes in the teachers’ conceptualisations. The findings are also relevant with regard to the quality of writing assessment. Formulations in non-defining statements should not be used as a basis for, or components of, rating criteria because they may constitute a threat to the reliabiliy and validity of the assessment. Rating criteria should be screened for the presence of formulations of non-defining statements and if such formulations are found, remedial action should be considered. These endeavours should ultimately foster a shared understanding of text type characteristics among practicing teachers. Eventually this will be beneficial for the practice of teaching and assessment. 7. References BMBWF (2019). Übersicht Charakteristika Textsorten lebende Fremdsprachen (SRDP): Stand August 2019. [online] https: / / www.matura.gv.at/ downloads/ download/ uebersicht-charakteristika-textsorten-lebende-fremdsprachen [March 2024]. BMBWF (2021). Testspezifikationen Schreiben B2, Version März 2021. Unpublished document. Brinker, Klaus. (1985). Linguistische Textanalyse: Eine Einführung in Grundbegriffe und Methoden. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [online] https: / / rm.coe.int/ 1680459f97 [March 2024]. Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment: Companion volume. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. [online] https: / / rm.coe.int/ common-european-framework-ofreference-for-languages-learning-teaching/ 16809ea0d4 [March 2024]. Glasswell, Kathryn, Judy Parr & Margaret Aikman (2001). Development of the asTTle writing assessment rubrics for scoring extended writing tasks. Technical Report 6, Project asTTle. Auckland: University of Auckland. [online] https: / / easttle. tki.org.nz/ content/ download/ 1460/ 5913/ version/ 1/ file/ 6.+Development+ of+writing+rubrics+2001.pdf [March 2024]. Günther Sigott et al. 66 Große, Ernst U. (1976). Text und Kommunikation: Eine linguistische Einführung in die Funktionen der Texte. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Heinemann, Margot (2011). Textlinguistische Typologisierungsansätze. In: Stephan Habscheid (Ed.). De Gruyter Lexikon. Textsorten, Handlungsmuster, Oberflächen: Linguistische Typologien der Kommunikation. Berlin: De Gruyter. 257-274. Heinemann, Wolfgang & Dieter Viehweger (1991). Textlinguistik: Eine Einführung. Berlin: De Gruyter. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1515/ 9783111376387 Hyland, Ken (2018). Genre and second language writing. In: John I. Liontas (Ed.). The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell. 2359-2364. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1002/ 9781118784235.eelt0535. Krieg-Holz, Ulrike (2017). Textsortenstile: Stilbeschreibung und Textsortenklassifikation. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Mayring, Philipp (2015). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken. Weinheim: Beltz. Richards, Jack. C. & Theodore S. Rodgers (2022). Text-Based Instruction. In: Jack C. Richards & Theodore S. Rosgers (Eds.). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 200-214. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1017/ 9781009024532.013 Sandig, Barbara (1972). Zur Differenzierung gebrauchssprachlicher Textsorten im Deutschen. In: Elisabeth Gülich & Wolfgang Raible (Eds.). Textsorten: Differenzierungskriterien aus linguistischer Sicht. Wiesbaden: Athenaion. 113-124. Sigott, Günther, Ulrike Krieg-Holz, Jürgen Struger & Hermann Cesnik (2020). Was verstehen Lehrende unter Kommentar und Erörterung? Eine empirische Untersuchung zur Textsortenfrage in der österreichischen Standardisierten Reife und Diplomprüfung Deutsch. Der Deutschunterricht 5: 81-86. Sowinski, Bernhard. (1978). Deutsche Stilistik: Beobachtungen zur Sprachverwendung und Sprachgestaltung im Deutschen. Frankfurt: Fischer. Spöttl, Carol, Kathrin Eberharter, Franz Holzknecht, Benjamin Kremmel & Matthias Zehentner (2018). Delivering reform in a high stakes context: From contentbased assessment to communicative and competence-based assessment. In: Günther Sigott (Ed.). Language Testing in Austria: Taking Stock/ Sprachtesten in Österreich: Eine Bestandsaufnahme. Berlin: Peter Lang. 219-239. Struger, Jürgen (2018). Deutsch als Unterrichtssprache: Das Konzept der schriftlichen Reife- und Diplomprüfung. In: Günther Sigott (Ed.). Language Testing in Austria: Taking Stock/ Sprachtesten in Österreich: Eine Bestandsaufnahme. Berlin: Peter Lang. 155-182. Swales, John M. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. 13 th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tardy, Christine M. (2006). Researching first and second language genre learning: A comparative review and a look ahead. Journal of Second Language Writing 15 (2): 79-101. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.jslw.2006.04.003 Tardy, Christine M. (2023). Genre‐based language teaching. In: Carol A. Chapelle (Ed.). The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. New Jersey: Wiley. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1002/ 9781405198431.wbeal0453.pub2 van Dijk, Teun A. (1980). Textwissenschaft: Eine interdisziplinäre Einführung. dtv Wissenschaft Vol. 4364. München: dtv. Werlich, Egon (1975). Typologie der Texte: Entwurf eines textlinguistischen Modells zur Grundlegung einer Textgrammatik. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 67 Yasuda, Sachiko (2011). Genre-based tasks in foreign language writing: Developing writers’ genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence. Journal of Second Language Writing 20 (2): 111-133. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.jslw.2011.03.001 Günther Sigott Samuel Hafner Hermann Cesnik Theresa Weiler Kristina Leitner Eva Dousset-Ortner Günther Sigott et al. 68 8. Appendix Questionnaire items (original and translation) Original statement in German Translated statement (1) Der Text enthält explizite Markierungen von Verknüpfung, die durch Konjunktionen, Adverbien usw. angezeigt werden. (cohesion/ coherence) The text contains explicit markers of cohesion and coherence indicated by conjunctions, adverbs, etc. (2) Der Text enthält fachsprachliche Ausdrücke. The text contains technical terms. (3) Der Text enthält expressive oder emotionale Ausdrücke. The text contains expressive or emotional expressions. (4) Der Text ist für den öffentlichen Kommunikationsbereich bestimmt. The text is intended for public communication. (5) Der Text weist einen Adressatenbezug auf. / Der Text macht es klar, an wen er gerichtet ist. The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed. (6) Der Text weist eine klare Struktur auf. The text has a clear structure. (7) Der Text folgt einem gängigen Textmuster. The text follows a common text pattern. (8) Der Text weist eine besondere stilistische Gestaltung und rhetorische Mittel auf. The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices. (9) Der Text äußert eine Meinung. The text expresses an opinion. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 69 (10) Der Text zielt auf Meinungsbildung ab / will von einem Standpunkt überzeugen. The text aims to shape opinion / wants to persuade. (11) Der Text soll unterhalten. The text is meant to entertain. (12) Der Text erzählt. The text is narrative. (13) Der Text erklärt. The text is explanatory. (14) Der Text argumentiert. The text is argumentative. (15) Der Text bewertet. The text is evaluative. (16) Der Text appelliert. The text is appellative. (17) Der Text beschreibt. The text is descriptive. (18) Der Text informiert. The text serves to inform. (19) Der Text rekapituliert/ resümiert. The text summarises / recapitulates. (20) Der Text vergleicht. The text makes comparisons. (21) Die Leserschaft wird direkt angesprochen. The reader is addressed directly. (22) Der Text soll Aufmerksamkeit erzeugen / auf sich ziehen. The text is meant to attract attention. (23) Der Text wurde geschrieben, um von einer größeren Leserschaft gelesen zu werden. The text is written to be read by a wider audience. Günther Sigott et al. 70 Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 71 Text Type Characteristics (TTCs) (BMBWF 2019) Anthropocentrism in monolingual English learners’ dictionaries - Revisited Reinhard Heuberger Heuberger 2003 analyzed monolingual English (learners’) dictionaries with regard to anthropocentrism, an ideology that regards nature primarily from the viewpoint of its usefulness to human beings. Focusing on reference works published in the mid-1990s, that article identified strong anthropocentric biases concerning animals within definitions. 20 years later, the present article revisits the learners’ dictionaries examined in said study and investigates whether the treatment of animals has become more objective in the current editions. 1. Introduction Dictionaries can be a revealing source when examining the prevailing views and biases of a society (cf. Landau 1993: 309). Lexicographers aim to provide objective information, and the biases which dictionaries nevertheless contain are usually those widely shared by the general public - thus going unnoticed at the time. Anthropocentrism is a prime example of overlooked bias. It regards nature and animals as means or instruments rather than ascribing any intrinsic value to them (cf. Kopnina et al. 2021). Within the framework of ecolinguistic 1 research, this paper compares animal-related dictionary definitions in monolingual English learners’ dictionaries from the mid-1990s with their present-day counterparts and investigates 1 According to the International Ecolinguistics Association, ‘ecolinguistics’ is a field which “explores the role of language in the life-sustaining interactions of humans, other species and the physical environment.” It is concerned with how the language used to talk about the environment contributes to its degradation, and also how linguistic diversity, like biodiversity, makes for a healthier planet. Cf. https: / / www.ecolinguistics-association.org/ . AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2024-0003 Reinhard Heuberger 74 whether the anthropocentric attitudes prevalent decades ago are still found in the current generation of reference works. 2 It seems justified to raise the question why anthropocentric language structures in general - and human-centered dictionary definitions in particular - should be studied critically in the first place. The short answer is that language is believed to influence the way we think and, ultimately, the way we act. 3 Or, to use the words of Michael Halliday (2001: 185): “language does not correspond, it construes.” Language thus not only reflects our (psychological) reality but has a share in forming it. The ecolinguist Alwin Fill has emphasized that anthropocentric language use can have significant detrimental effects (2002: 21): “[It] suggests contrasts where none exist in nature, it introduces causality into processes where there is only interdependence, and it separates humans from the rest of nature.” Compared to newspapers and television news programs, dictionaries play an only minor role in shaping public opinion. At the same time, dictionaries are commonly regarded as authorities on language issues (cf. Moon 2003: 634; cf. Jackson 1994: 42), and language learners are thus particularly likely to store and emulate the style and content of the definitions (cf. Veisbergs 2005: 537). As Moon (2014: 85) puts it: “Ideologically positioned meaning is central to the concerns of critical lexicography, and particularly important with respect to learners’ dictionaries because of their positioning as global texts for a pluralist multicultural usership.” Anthropocentrism in (learners’) dictionaries should therefore not be regarded as trivial or negligible, and it ought to be investigated in the same way as other ideologies, e.g. sexism, ageism, racism or ethnocentrism. 4 2 Heuberger (2003) not only analyzed printed learners’ dictionaries (such as LDOCE and OALD) but also CD-ROM reference works intended for learners (e.g. CCSD and LIED) as well as dictionaries for native speakers (e.g. OED and ENCARTA). Several of the dictionaries investigated have not had any subsequent editions - for instance, the two CD-ROM dictionaries mentioned. To account for this fact, and to achieve a clearer research focus, the present article concentrates on the online versions of the “big five” monolingual English learners’ dictionaries and compares them to their predecessors examined in the 2003 article. 3 This notion is known as ‘linguistic relativity’, a concept particularly associated with the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. 4 Several studies have investigated ideology in dictionaries, though none of them with regard to anthropocentrism. Cf. Kachru & Kahane (1995, reprint 2013), a pioneering volume addressing various issues related to cultures, ideologies and the dictionary; see also Moon (2014), Chen (2018) and Benson (2001). Anthropocentrism in Monolingual English Learners’ Dictionaries - Revisited 75 2. Anthropocentrism: a brief typology There are two main types of linguistic anthropocentrism. The most common form of human-centeredness, both in everyday language and in (learners’) dictionaries, is what Jung (2001: 275) and other linguists have termed utilitaristic anthropocentrism. Here, animals are viewed as a resource for human use. For instance, on the lexical level, they are categorized as ‘furbearing animals’, ‘experimental animals’ or ‘domestic animals’. The latter can be subdivided into ‘milk cows’, ‘laying hens’ and ‘porkers’. On the discursive level - in our case within dictionary definitions - the utility (or harmfulness) of animals is emphasized, while other relevant features may be ignored. Such usage is, prima facie, convenient as the corresponding terms and definitions immediately indicate the most important benefits and uses of animals. At the same time, it is debatable from an environmentally ethical and ecolinguistic point of view, given that intrinsic features and values, e.g. the animals’ appearance and their unique ecological role, are disregarded. Such usage reinforces the idea that the animals in question can and are meant to be used for the purposes given. The disproportionate focus on the utility of animals constitutes the most widespread form of anthropocentrism in dictionary definitions. Another form of anthropocentrism known as distancing (cf. Heuberger 2018) refers to the use of different words for equal or analogous human and non-human concepts. Such usage creates emotional distance between the species, usually putting humans in a superior position and thus indirectly justifying exploitative behavior. For instance, while humans ‘live’ in a certain area, animals ‘are found’ there. Words such as ‘eat’, ‘skin’ and ‘corpse’ are typically associated with humans, whereas ‘feed’, ‘hide’ and ‘carcass’ are used for animals. Defining terms like ‘vermin’ and ‘pest’ also have a distancing, i.e. separating, function. From an ecolinguistic perspective, the use of such terms should be questioned critically as they discriminate against other species and provide a distorted view of ecological reality. There are further subtypes 5 of anthropocentrism, but the two categories named above - utilitaristic anthropocentrism and distancing - are the ones found most often in dictionaries. 3. Anthropocentrism in learners’ dictionaries: a critical investigation Twenty years ago, Heuberger (2003) argued that the 1995 generation of learners’ dictionaries was “characterised by a striking tendency to empha- 5 For instance, metaphors and euphemisms can also be anthropocentric. Cf. Heuberger (2018) for a more detailed typology. Reinhard Heuberger 76 size anthropocentric features within the definitions for animal terms.” Rather than describing the animals’ phenotype, e.g. appearance and behavior, lexicographers primarily accentuated their utility. As more than 25 years have passed since the publication of those dictionaries, one might expect the current 6 generation of learners’ dictionaries to have progressed 7 toward a more objective and neutral portrayal of animals. Disappointingly, this is not the case. The following definitions illustrate anthropocentric biases typical of both the 1995 and the current generation of monolingual English learners’ dictionaries. 8 The first set concerns the lexical field ‘marine fauna,’ which has repeatedly been portrayed as a food resource, often ignoring more objective and inherent features of the animals: sardine a young pilchard or a similar fish, cooked and eaten fresh or preserved in tins in oil or tomato sauce (OALD 1995) sardine a small young sea fish (for example, a young pilchard) that is either eaten fresh or preserved in tins (OALDO 2022) trout a fish that lives in rivers, lakes, etc and is good to eat. There are several types of trout (OALD 1995) trout a common freshwater fish that is used for food. There are several types of trout (OALDO 2022) shrimp a small pink sea creature that you can eat, with ten legs and with a soft shell (LDOCE 1995) shrimp a small sea creature that you can eat, which has ten legs and a soft shell (LDOCEO 2022) 6 The dictionaries investigated are the online versions of the ‘big five’ British monolingual English learners’ dictionaries (in alphabetical order): The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Online (CALDO), the Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Online (COBUILDO), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online (LDOCEO), the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners Online (MEDALO) and the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Online (OALDO). 7 A more progressive approach to a different social area, gender, is reflected in the official consent form for COVID-19 vaccinations published in Austria in December 2022. The form lists no fewer than five options for the signatory’s gender - ‘female’, ‘male’, ‘diverse’, ‘inter’ and ‘open’ - thus reflecting important social and linguistic changes.https: / / www.sozialministerium.at/ dam/ jcr: e11b58c1-71d3-47d4-b059- 5960bfe39ef5/ Schutzimpfung_Covid-19-Formular_mRNA-Impfstoffe.pdf 8 The Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (MEDAL) was first published in 2002 and was not considered in the 2003 article. Thus, MEDAL does not appear in the following comparison of definitions. The latest online version (MEDALO), however, has been included in Table 1, which portrays anthropocentrism in the current generation of online reference works for learners. Anthropocentrism in Monolingual English Learners’ Dictionaries - Revisited 77 Such definitions are debatable from an ecolinguistic and a lexicographic point of view - for several reasons. Dictionary users are unlikely to benefit from the information that the animals in question are edible, as this is true of many animals and thus often not a distinctive feature. In explaining and distinguishing headwords, some semantic features are clearly more characteristic than others, and it is a key task of a lexicographer to include these contrasting features in the definition (cf. Ayto 1983: 92). As Jackson has pointed out, effective definitions do not state everything there is to be said about the meaning of a word, but they do serve to distinguish a referent from related ones in the lexicon (1994: 80). Another violation of lexicographic principles becomes apparent in the definitions for ‘shrimp’, namely the failure to recognise what Landau has called priority of essence (1993: 132). According to this principle, the most essential elements of meaning should be listed first, followed by more incidental features. The definitions above, however, give the impression that edibility is the major characteristic of shrimp, more important than their phenotype (e.g. “ten legs”). This is clearly a highly anthropocentric approach. So-called ‘domestic animals’ suffer the same lexicographic fate of objectification as their marine relatives in that they are normally treated as instruments for human use. The following definitions portray these animals as subordinate links in the human food chain or as tools. pig a farm animal kept for its meat (CIDE 9 1995) pig a large pink, brown, or black farm animal with short legs and a curved tail, kept for its meat (CALDO 2022) turkey a bird that looks like a large chicken and is often eaten at Christmas and at Thanksgiving (LDOCE 1995) turkey a bird that looks like a large chicken and is often eaten at Christmas and at Thanksgiving (LDOCEO 2022) dog a very common animal that people keep as a pet or to guard a building (LDOCE 1995) dog a common animal with four legs, fur, and a tail. Dogs are kept as pets or trained to guard places, find drugs etc (LDOCEO 2022) Compared with their 1995 learners’ dictionaries, Cambridge and Longman have included more details on the appearance of pigs and dogs in their current editions. Anthropocentric features are, however, still provided in the definitions. 9 The first edition of the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary was entitled Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE). Reinhard Heuberger 78 A more objective and neutral description, without the anthropocentric focus and without losing any clarity of definition, is seen in Oxford’s definition of ‘pig’ in the 1995 edition of OALD. In its current edition, however, a more anthropocentric portrayal is given: pig a domestic or wild animal with pink or black skin, short legs, a broad nose and a short tail that curls (OALD 1995) pig an animal with pink, black or brown skin, short legs, a broad nose and a short curly tail. Pigs are kept on farms for their meat (called pork) or live in the wild (OALDO 2022) Animals that live in the wild are not excepted from anthropocentric definition, especially when humans have a practical use for them: mink mink is a very expensive fur used to make coats or hats (CCSD 10 1996) mink a mink is a small animal with highly valued fur (COBUILDO 2022) rhesus a small monkey common in N India, often used in scientific experiments (OALD 1995) rhesus monkey a small South Asian monkey, often used in scientific experiments (OALDO 2022) Collins’ definition of ‘mink’ in CCSD is particularly anthropocentric in that it completely disregards the phenotypical characteristics of the animal, only referring to the luxury item that humans derive from it. COBUILDO 2022 at least takes into account that a mink is - first and foremost - an animal. From an anthropocentric point of view, animals also have detrimental and unwanted traits that render them a potential nuisance or even threat to human beings. Lexicographers frequently emphasize these traits, treating them as more relevant than inherent features of the animals. In some isolated cases, neutral definitions are admittedly difficult to achieve, and dictionary users may not find them useful. Locusts, for example, are generally perceived as destroying plants and harvests, while, viewed objectively, they eat to subsist starvation. From an ecolinguistic point of view, the following definitions are problematic as they fail to depict the animals in an impartial and unbiased way. 10 Collins Cobuild Student Dictionary. Anthropocentrism in Monolingual English Learners’ Dictionaries - Revisited 79 locust a type of African and Asian insect that flies in huge groups, destroying all the plants and crops of a district (OALD 1995) locust a large insect that lives in hot countries and sometimes flies in large groups, destroying all the plants and crops of an area (OALDO 2022) shark a shark is a very large fish. Some sharks have very sharp teeth and may attack people. (COBUILD 1995) shark a shark is a very large fish. Some sharks have very sharp teeth and may attack people (COBUILDO 2022) wasp a black and yellow flying insect which can sting you (CIDE 1995) wasp a flying insect, often black and yellow, that can sting (= produce a small, painful skin injury) (CALDO 2022) Even more explicit and debatable is the use of distancing or speciesist 11 defining terms, which put entire species of animals in a bad light. For instance, Oxford uses the term ‘pest’ to define rats in its latest edition of OALD. Distancing terms such as ‘vermin’ and ‘pest’ do not occur frequently within definitions of learners’ dictionaries but are sometimes found in example sentences, where they may have similar effects on the user. 12 rat a small animal with a long tail, that looks like a large mouse, usually considered a pest (= an animal which is disliked because it destroys food or spreads disease) (OALDO 2022) In addition to usefulness and distancing, another type of anthropocentrism in learners’ dictionaries recalls the adage, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Both past and current editions of learners’ dictionaries feature definitions depicting animals according to anthropocentric notions of beauty. Gazelles, for instance, are described as jumping gracefully and having large beautiful eyes, while vultures are defined as ‘ugly’ birds, at least in the Longman Interactive English Dictionary (LIED) published in 1996. gazelle a type of small deer, which jumps very gracefully and has large beautiful eyes (LDOCE 1995) 11 The term was coined by psychologist and animal rights advocate Richard Ryder in the 1970s, referring to discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual’s species membership (analogous to racism). 12 A thorough investigation of example sentences would be worth a study of its own, most likely showing very similar results with regard to the amount of anthropocentrism. Reinhard Heuberger 80 gazelle a type of small deer, which jumps very gracefully and has large beautiful eyes (LDOCEO 2022) vulture a large ugly bird with an almost featherless head and neck, which feeds on dead animals. In jokes and humorous drawings, vultures often fly or sit above a person who is dying, esp. in a desert (LIED 1996) vulture a large bird that eats dead animals (LDOCEO 2022) While not all animal terms are defined from an anthropocentric viewpoint, this ideology is clearly present in both past and current learners’ dictionaries. For comparison, the following table, listing animals that play an important role for humans (at least in the Western world), shows that anthropocentric features (indicated by +) are found in the great majority of definitions. LDOCEO OALDO CALDO COBUILDO MEDALO bee + + + - + chicken + + + + + cockroach + + + + + cow + + + + + dog + + + + + donkey - + - - + frog - - - - goat + + + + horse + + + + + locust + + + + + mosquito + + + + + oyster + + + + + pig + + + + + salmon - + + + sardine + + + + + shark + + - + + sheep + + + + + snake - - - - termite + + - + + wolf - - - - - Results 15 / 20 17 / 20 14 / 20 15 / 20 15 / 20 Table 1. Anthropocentric features in definitions of current learners’ dictionaries. Table 1 confirms that anthropocentrism is strongly present in current learners’ dictionaries - undoubtedly going unnoticed by the great majority of Anthropocentrism in Monolingual English Learners’ Dictionaries - Revisited 81 lexicographers and learners. Dictionary makers and users should, however, be aware that anthropocentrism is a bias much like racism and sexism. The only objectifiable difference is that animals - rather than humans - are the targets. A comparison of the mid-1990s generation of learners’ dictionaries with the most up-to-date editions shows that the awareness of this bias has barely increased over the past 25 years. This is especially conspicuous when compared to other social areas that have witnessed significant progress in the same time span. 4. Concluding remarks The use of the term ‘awareness’ in this context seems important. It should be emphasized that ecolinguists generally do not demand that certain language patterns be avoided or banned, whether in everyday language or dictionary definitions. Ecolinguistic language criticism is not dogmatic or prescriptive (cf. Fill 1993: 116); its main aim is to create awareness of the inherent 13 anthropocentric nature of our language and thinking patterns and of the ecological problems that may arise from them. It should be noted that dictionaries for native speakers generally present a more balanced description of animals (cf. Heuberger 2003), which can at least partly be attributed to the greater length of their entries. Native speaker dictionaries are not only lexically but also factually more scientific than their counterparts for language learners, with most animal-related definitions providing information on generic class and phenotype, sometimes also habitat. The greater amount of anthropocentrism in learners’ dictionaries is most likely due to their goal of offering ‘simple’ 14 explanations, given that information on utility (or harmfulness) is easily comprehensible in terms of lexis and complexity. Unlike certain interest groups (such as agricultural marketing companies), lexicographers should not be accused of using anthropocentric language structures intentionally for manipulative purposes. This does not, however, mean that lexicographic manifestations of human-centredness are unproblematic or negligible; the learners’ dictionaries investigated in this paper are used by millions of people worldwide, and lexicographers have their share in perpetuating anthropocentric views by continuing to include them in dictionaries. In keeping with Veisbergs (2005: 537), learners’ dictionaries can, at least to some extent, “create and consolidate biased perceptions of the meaning of various language units.” In times of growing ecological awareness, dictionary makers should finally pay due attention 13 Anthropocentrism in language may be perceived as ‘natural’ as it is a product of evolution (cf. Fill 2006: 148). However, ‘natural’ should not be equated with ‘proper’ or ‘acceptable’. 14 The definitions in learners’ dictionaries are normally compiled using a restricted vocabulary (called ‘defining vocabulary’) that consists of only a few thousand words. Reinhard Heuberger 82 to this issue and compile definitions with less bias - not only with regard to humans but also animals. 5. Bibliography Dictionaries evaluated CALDO. Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Online. https: / / dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/ learner-english/ [November 2022]. CCSD (1996). Collins COBUILD Student’s Dictionary on CD-ROM. London: Harper- Collins Publishers Ltd. CIDE (1996). Cambridge International Dictionary of English. Ed. Paul Procter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. COBUILD (1998). Collins COBUILD English Dictionary. Ed. John Sinclair. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. COBUILDO. Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Online. https: / / www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/ english [November 2022]. ENCARTA (2001). Encarta Concise English Dictionary. Ed. Kathy Rooney. London: Bloomsbury. LDOCE (1995). Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Ed. Della Summers. Harlow: Longman Group Ltd. LDOCEO. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online. https: / / www.ldo ceonline.com/ [November 2022]. LIED (1996). Longman Interactive English Dictionary. Ed. Della Summers. Addison Wesley Longman Ltd. MEDAL (2002). Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. Ed. Michael Rundell. London: Macmillan Publishers. MEDALO. Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners Online. http: / / www.macmillandictionary.com/ [November 2022]. OALD (1995). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Ed. Jonathan Crowther. Oxford: Oxford University Press. OALDO. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Online. https: / / www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ [November 2022]. OED (1933). Oxford English Dictionary. Eds. James A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, W. A. Craigie and C.T. Onions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Works cited Ayto, John R. (1983). On specifying meaning: Semantic analysis and dictionary definitions. In: Reinhard R. K. Hartmann (Ed.). Lexicography: Principles and Practice. London: Academic Press: 89-98. Benson, Phil (2001). Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary. London: Routledge. Chen, Wenge (2019). Towards a discourse approach to critical lexicography. International Journal of Lexicography 32 (3): 362-388. Fill, Alwin (1993). Ökolinguistik. Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Fill, Alwin (2002). Tensional arches: Language and ecology. In: Alwin Fill, Hermine Penz & Willhelm Trampe (Eds). Colourful Green Ideas. Wien: Lang. 15-7. Anthropocentrism in Monolingual English Learners’ Dictionaries - Revisited 83 Fill, Alwin (2006). Literatur und Ökolinguistik: Anthropozentrische, anthropomorphe und physiozentrische Sprache in englischen Gedichten. Anglia 124 (1): 144- 177. Fill, Alwin & Peter Mühlhäusler (2001). Introduction. In: Alwin Fill & Peter Mühlhäusler (Eds.). The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Environment. London: Continuum. 1-9. Halliday, Michael A. Kirkwood (2001). New Ways of meaning: The challenge to applied linguistics. In: Alwin Fill & Peter Mühlhäusler (Eds.). The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Environment. London: Continuum. 175-202. Heuberger, Reinhard (2003). Anthropocentrism in monolingual English dictionaries. An ecolinguistic approach to the lexicographic treatment of faunal terminology. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28 (1): 93-105. Heuberger, Reinhard (2018). Overcoming anthropocentrism with anthropomorphic and physiocentric uses of language? In: Alwin Fill & Hermine Penz (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. New York/ London: Routledge. 342-354. Jackson, Howard. (1994). Words and Their Meaning. London: Longman. Kachru, Braj B. & Henry Kahane (Eds.). 1995. Cultures, Ideologies, and the Dictionary: Studies in Honor of Ladislav Zgusta. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kopnina, Helen, Haydn Washington, Bron Taylor & John J. Piccolo (2021) Anthropocentrism: More than just a misunderstood problem. The International Journal of Ecopsychology 3 (1): 109-127. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1007/ s10806-018-9711-1 Jung, Matthias (2001). Ecological criticism of language. In: Alwin Fill & Peter Mühlhäusler (Eds.). The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Environment. London: Continuum. 270-285. Landau, Sidney I. (1993). Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moon, Rosamund (2003). Dictionaries: Notions and expectations. In: Anna Braasch & Claus Povlsen (Eds.). Proceedings of the Tenth EURALEX International Congress: EURALEX 2002: Copenhagen, Denmark, August 13-17, 2002, Volume 2. Kopenhagen: Center for Sprogteknologi. 629-636. Moon, Rosamund (2014). Meanings, ideologies, and learners’ dictionaries. In: Andrea Abel, Chiara Vettori & Natascia Ralli (Eds.). Proceedings of the XVI EURA- LEX International Congress: The User in Focus. Bolzano: EURAC research. 85-105. Veisbergs, Aandrejs (2005). Ideology in dictionaries: Definitions of political terms. In: Henrik Gottlieb, Jens Erik Mogensen & Arne Zettersten (Eds.). Proceedings of the Eleventh International Symposium on Lexicography May 2-4, 2002 at the University of Copenhagen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 537-548. Reinhard Heuberger University of Innsbruck Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018: What does it tell us? Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc This paper reports on a qualitative study of dictionary use at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, during which nine students were given look-up tasks with the online Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary. The study employed a combination of research methods: semistructured oral interviews and the researchers’ direct observation of the participants as they looked up words. As the students completed these tasks, they were observed and questioned about their habits of dictionary use, their lookup experience, and their perceptions of the utility and quality of the dictionary definitions and examples. The results provide insight into the efficacy of the specific dictionary used. In addition, the study reveals much about how these students regard dictionaries and how they approach their use. Many of the participants had no relationship with dictionaries and no real understanding of their purpose. Their comments demonstrate that they are “demanding” users with very firm ideas and high expectations about the type of information they wish to receive in an online dictionary - and how they prefer to have it delivered. Some recommendations are made for those involved in learner lexicography concerning the improvement of part-of-speech information to make lookup easier, improvement of dictionary examples and improvement of the way dictionary information is presented. This paper also discusses what the takeaways are for concerned dictionary makers; in particular, it will reflect on how students should be taught about dictionaries today - if we still want them to use dictionaries tomorrow. 1. Introduction Within the framework of a joint project between Slovenia and the United States (see Acknowledgements), a qualitative dictionary study was carried out in March 2018 with nine students in the School of Economics and Business at the University of Ljubljana. The students majored in different areas AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2024-0004 Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 86 of business and economics and were not specialists in English. The dictionary used in the study was the Merriam-Webster Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the only American learner’s dictionary; the study used the online variant called the Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary (MWLD; https: / / learn ersdictionary.com/ ). 1 The goal of this study was to learn about the students’ habits, impressions, and look-up challenges while using an online dictionary. Before turning to the study itself, it will be helpful to provide first some background information on learner lexicography. What follows is a brief history of learner’s dictionaries as well as a review of research studies that have investigated dictionary users. 2. The history of English learner’s dictionaries Learner’s dictionaries can be traced back to the 1920s and 30s and resulted from the experience of British educators in English language teaching in Japan. The pioneers in learner lexicography were Michael West, Harold E. Palmer, and Albert Sydney Hornby, who are considered today as the founding fathers of applied linguistics. They conducted research - vocabulary studies - in Japan (Palmer and Hornby) and India (West), to determine the effects of using a controlled (i.e., limited and simpler) vocabulary in dictionaries. The earliest learner’s dictionaries were developed in the 1930s from the vocabulary studies of West, Palmer, and Hornby, as well as the U.S. linguist Edward L. Thorndike (cf. Battenburg 1994; Cowie 1998; Landau 2001). Michael West concentrated his research on how existing reading texts for learners of English could be improved; he is considered ahead of his time in his ideas about facilitating the development of foreign-language reading (Battenburg 1994). The first principle he proposed was the simplification of vocabulary by removing rare or dated words and using more common or more modern equivalents instead. This formed the basis for what is now known as a controlled defining vocabulary, a list of 2,000- 3,000 high-frequency words that the learner is expected to know sufficiently well to be able to understand any definition in a learner’s dictionary. West’s second principle was to distribute any new words (beyond the controlled vocabulary) appearing in a reader in such a way that they do not appear too close together; in other words, he introduced new words more slowly and distributed them throughout a text (Battenburg 1994). This allows the user of the text to absorb and practice them thoroughly. In 1 As of June 2023, this link still leads to the dictionary of the original research study. However, the dictionary has been rebranded as “The Britannica Dictionary” (https: / / www.britannica.com/ dictionary) by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., the sister company of Merriam-Webster. A Merriam lexicographer confirmed that the dictionary itself has not changed. Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 87 the English readers prepared by West, the number of new words decreased at the same time that the total number of words in the running text increased significantly. On the basis of his research into the benefits of vocabulary control (i.e. limitation), West compiled The New Method English Dictionary (1935) in collaboration with James Gareth Endicott. In this - the very first - learner’s dictionary, West introduced the simplified defining vocabulary outlined in his Definition Vocabulary, published in the same year (Rundell 1998; Cowie 1999; Atkins & Rundell 2008; Svensén 2009). Definition Vocabulary is a research report describing how the vocabulary was selected, checked, and revised. It originally consisted of 1,799 words but was later reduced to 1,490 words used to define the 23,898 vocabulary items included in The New Method English Dictionary. Today, all learner’s dictionaries make use of a controlled defining vocabulary. In order to understand how a controlled vocabulary drastically changes the way dictionary definitions look, we repeat below a timely example also noted by Battenburg (1994) that compares the definition for the word vaccinate in West’s New Method Dictionary with that in a dictionary intended for native English speakers (Webster’s New International Dictionary): New Method Dictionary (West & Endicott 1935) vaccinate ... to protect against smallpox (= a dangerous disease causing spots on the skin) by putting into the arm a liquid obtained from cows which have had the disease. Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2 nd edition (Nelson 1934) vaccinate ... to inoculate with cowpox vaccine, esp. in order to prevent or mitigate any attack of smallpox; hence, to inoculate with any vaccine, or, loosely, any virus, esp. as a preventive measure. Harold Palmer was also interested in vocabulary control. Battenburg (1994) notes that Palmer and West “considered the experienced classroom teacher’s ‘vocabulary sense’ to be as important as the relative frequency of vocabulary items; ” the practical classroom experience of both men left an imprint on their research and theories. In 1924, Palmer published A Grammar of Spoken English, a scholarly work treating sentence patterns in a series of tables. This laid the foundation for the verb patterns presented in early learner’s dictionaries (see the discussion of Hornby, below). In 1938, Palmer published A Grammar of English Words, a highly innovative learner’s dictionary (despite the title suggesting a grammar book). This is a pioneering encoding dictionary (i.e., a dictionary that enables users to create or encode their own texts). In it, Palmer made use of his own structured word list (Thousand-Word English, 1937), which he prepared with A.S. Hornby. Palmer’s A Grammar of English Words is the first dictionary ever to label countable nouns (such as book/ books) and uncountable nouns (such as Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 88 rice). It also employed an original approach to indicating variation in examples. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of 1974 provides good illustrations of how variation in examples operates in learner’s dictionaries. For the noun collapse, this dictionary has: “the collapse of a table/ tent/ tower …; the collapse of their plans/ hopes.” For the verb refresh, this dictionary gives: “refresh oneself with a cup of tea/ a warm bath.” Variation in examples with the adjective lofty is given as “a lofty tower/ mountain.” Palmer’s approach to examples left an indelible mark on Hornby’s later Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942), the precursor to the modern-day Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. A. S. Hornby played a leading role in phraseological research and also engaged in research on word lists (Cowie 1999). He was the originator of the 1,000-word vocabulary which impacted Palmer’s A Grammar of English Words (1938). In 1937, together with E. V. Gatenby and H. Wakefield, Hornby began work on a new type of general monolingual dictionary aimed at foreign learners. It was published as The Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942) and later reissued by Oxford University Press as A Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (1948), the first edition of what would become the well-known Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD). Hornby’s dictionary is renowned for building on the work of Palmer and including a full-fledged verb-pattern scheme (Cowie 1998, 1999). We can turn to a later version of Hornby’s original dictionary, the OALD of 1974, for examples of the type of information about verb patterns that became standard in learner’s dictionaries. The 1974 dictionary’s front matter (pp. xvi-xvii) lists, explains, and exemplifies as many as 51 different verb patterns. The verb pattern “VP6E” is explained as “S + NEED/ WANT, etc + gerund, etc (passive),” which means that after need/ want and won’t/ wouldn’t bear, the gerund is equivalent to a passive infinitive. This pattern is exemplified in the dictionary by: ‣ My shoes want mending. ‣ He’ll need looking after. ‣ His language wouldn’t bear repeating (= His language wouldn’t bear (= was too bad) to be repeated.) All the editions of the OALD published over the years have been great commercial successes in the field of English language teaching; the tenth edition was published in 2020. A. S. Hornby achieved a unique status and authority in learner lexicography; to this day, his name is synonymous with learner’s dictionaries (Landau 2001). The period of the 1960s and 70s is considered the second generation of learner’s dictionaries. In 1978, the OALD was challenged by a competitor when the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English was published. Well Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 89 into the Information Age, the 1980s mark a watershed in learner lexicography. In 1987, the first entirely corpus-based dictionary appeared on the market, the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary. A corpus is a database, a collection of thousands (or more) of texts that allow a dictionary maker to look up words and then examine word usage in context. The Collins company calls the 1987 dictionary “the first of a new generation of dictionaries that were based on real examples of English rather than on compilers’ intuition” (Collins English Language Teaching Blog (online)). COBUILD was not only innovative in that it used a corpus, but it also used a new style of definitions called full-sentence definitions. Full-sentence definitions were developed on the basis of the findings of spoken discourse analysis and are characterized by the use of complete sentences that include the definiendum (i.e., the word that is being defined). The full-sentence definition resembles ordinary speech and consists of two parts: the first part, in which the definiendum is embedded, exemplifies usage and is called the contextualization part, while the second part supplies the actual definition and is called the explanatory part (Atkins & Rundell 2008: 441; Svensén 2009: 235, 236). At the same time, the fourth edition of the OALD was published (1989) and the second edition of Longman appeared in print (1987). These dictionaries of the 1980s are considered the third generation of learner’s dictionaries. The end of the twentieth century and beginning of our new century brought more competition with other publishers entering the scene. Cambridge University Press entered the market in 1995 with the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, renamed the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary for the 2005 (second) edition. The latest newcomers to the field of learner lexicography are the Macmillan English Dictionary, first published in 2002, and the first American contribution, the Merriam-Webster Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary, which first appeared in 2008. The most recent edition of Longman is the seventh edition published as an e-book in 2023, that of Collins COBUILD is the tenth edition published in 2023, and the latest from Cambridge University Press is the fourth edition (2013). Merriam-Webster’s second edition of the Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary appeared in print in 2016. The end of the 20th century did not only see competition among English learner’s dictionaries but also the first transformation of medium, i.e., paper dictionaries were turned into CD- ROMs with technical challenges and new potentials. All six of these learner’s dictionaries are now available online. 2 Five of these online dic- 2 The online versions of these dictionaries are available as follows: http: / / www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ definition/ english/ ; http: / / www.ldoceonline.com/ ; http: / / www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/ english; http: / / dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/ british/ ; http: / / www.macmillandictionary.com/ ; and https: / / www.britannica.com/ dictionary. Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 90 tionaries include residue from the above-mentioned technical transformation processes, which take time to complete and are costly. What is more, because the older lexicographers do not live in the same media space as the much younger dictionary users, the decisions about how to configure new online formats are not always optimal for modern users. It is uncertain how many more print editions from the “Big Six” publishers we can expect in the future. Already twelve years ago, the Macmillan company announced in its blog “the end of the printed dictionary” (Rundell 2012). Hornby, Palmer, and West, with their deep understanding of the problems faced by English learners, undertook the meticulous study of vocabulary, verb patterns, variation in common word combinations, and many other areas of language. Their painstaking work laid the foundation for contemporary learner lexicography. Today, when the students at the University of Ljubljana or elsewhere in the world type a word in the search box of online English learner’s dictionaries, they are certainly not aware of how many layers of history they are accessing. 3. Studies of dictionary use Before the 1960s, learner lexicography relied on empirical but anecdotal observations by dictionary makers. More systematic research on dictionary users and on the dictionary consultation process began in the 1960s, concurrent with the advent of the second generation of learner’s dictionaries (see above). An early user study of monolingual English speakers was carried out by the American lexicographer Clarence Barnhart, to find out what dictionary users look up most commonly. Barnhart circulated a written questionnaire in “99 colleges in 27 states” (1962: 162) in the United States, and concluded that American college freshmen most often use dictionaries for meaning and spelling. In the 1970s, research began to focus on who uses dictionaries, what for, and how. Tomaszczyk (1979) was the first to study the needs of foreign learners of English; he utilized a written questionnaire and identified translation, writing, and reading as the most common reasons that they used the dictionary. Studies of dictionary users, especially of the users of learner’s dictionaries, proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s and have continued to appear frequently up to the present. In the Internet era, the main intent of research into dictionary use is to find out in which situations dictionaries are consulted and how they are used; investigators also examine different components of the online dictionary environment to determine how successfully users are accessing each component (Müller-Spitzer, Koplenig & Wolfer 2018). Similarly, Kosem et al. (2019) investigated how often, on which devices, and in which situations monolingual dictionaries were used. Most studies are of English dictionaries (monolingual, bilingual, bilingualized) (Béjoint 2010) and of their users. Béjoint (1994) discussed studies showing Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 91 that some types of dictionary information are consistently misunderstood and some types are rarely used; he emphasized the complexity of the dictionary consultation process and maintained that there is a disconnect between the reference skills of the dictionary user and the expectations of the dictionary maker. A seminar sponsored by the European Association for Lexicography addressed research into dictionary use and design (Cowie 1987); Atkins (1998) honed in on the use of dictionaries by translators and language learners. Dolezal and McCreary’s (1999) critical bibliography of pedagogical lexicography discussed numerous studies. Béjoint (2010) presented a detailed review of topics addressed by different dictionary researchers. There are studies of reference needs (what do the users look up; are dictionaries used for meaning and spelling only), studies of how dictionaries are used (the look-up process; general look-up strategies; understanding the definitions; where do the users look for multiword items), and studies of how dictionaries help (is there a better definition style; how should information for expression be conveyed; does the dictionary help users understand words; dictionaries and understanding a text). Below, we mention briefly some well-known recent dictionary user studies and compare them with the present study, of Slovenian students in economics and business. The user study under focus here, the first of its kind to be carried out in Slovenia, examined the dictionary consultation process. The researchers observed and took notes as nine Slovenian advanced learners of English searched for specific, infrequent meanings in an online learner’s dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary (MWLD). Following the look-up process, we asked student-participants a series of questions. Unlike the studies of Lew (2011) or Lorentzen and Theilgaard (2012), the present study did not address how users find or access dictionaries. Rather, in this study, the dictionary was immediately presented to them on-screen; they were not given the choice to use a print dictionary instead or an online dictionary from another publisher. The present study also contrasts with studies that compare two or more different dictionaries. For example, Herbst (1996) looked at collocations (i.e., words that appear frequently together, such as narrow margin or considerable margin 3 ), definitions, policies related to examples, and other matters in four learner’s dictionaries; de Schryver and Prinsloo (2011) investigated the definitions from three different Dutch dictionaries. Liu, Zheng and Chen (2019) sought to discover how Chinese EFL learners use and view smartphone dictionaries. In contrast with Gouws (2014) and Lew and de Schryver (2014), the Slovenian study did not have as one of its goals the examination of the design 3 The online Collins COBUILD dictionary has a feature called “Related Word Partners” to illustrate collocations (i.e., combinations) of words. For the word margin, they list 19 different ones (https: / / www.collinsdictionary.com/ us/ dictionary/ english/ margin). Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 92 or format of online dictionary information; nevertheless, our results show that design is a crucial factor for the users we worked with. There are numerous studies that have explored the ordering of meanings or salience of meaning positions (see Dziemianko 2014 for a summary of such studies); the users in the present study provided new findings about the significance of the order in which information is presented in the online dictionary environment. Our study participants were not shy in sharing their suggestions for improving online learner’s dictionaries; they made clear the diverse types of expectations they brought with them to the dictionary. 4. Methodology of the Slovenian study 4 As indicated in the Introduction, this study was carried out in 2018 under a joint project between Slovenia and the United States. The participants were nine students in the School of Business and Economics at the University of Ljubljana. While these students used English daily, they were by no means specialists in the language. The researchers wished to discover what the participants expect from a dictionary. The researchers observed the participants’ dictionary look-up process and used prepared questions to encourage participants to recommend improvements in online learner’s dictionaries. The online Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary (MWLD) used in the study was selected because it is unknown to most university students in Slovenia. In fact, none of the study participants had familiarity with it. The study employed a combination of research methods: semi-structured oral interviews (Qu & Dumay 2011) and the researchers’ direct observation of the participants as they looked up words (Hatherall 1984). During the semi-structured interviews, the participants were asked questions that corresponded to four pre-identified topics (see below); such questions received follow-ups when necessary, depending on the context of a given moment (Hannabuss 1996). While they were looking up the words in the dictionary, the students were encouraged to think aloud (Wingate 2002) and explain what they were doing at any given time. The four pre-identified topics were: 1. Habits of Dictionary Use 2. Look-up Ability of Participants 3. Perceptions of Usefulness and Quality of Definitions 4. Perceptions of Usefulness and Quality of Dictionary Examples 4 For more detailed information on the methodology and results of this study, see Farina, Vrbinc and Vrbinc (2019), Vrbinc, Farina and Vrbinc (2022), Vrbinc, Vrbinc and Farina (2023). Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 93 There were 14 interview questions in all. The first six were general, designed to obtain background information about the students’ previous use of dictionaries. They covered dictionary use habits, participants’ satisfaction with dictionaries they use, and speed/ efficiency of look-up. One question asked what students dislike in the dictionaries they use (Topic 1: Habits of Dictionary Use). After answering these general questions, each participant proceeded to read a series of very short texts with targeted words in them. In all, there were nine common words from standard English for the students to look up. However, in the nine short texts that students were given, these words were not used in their common meanings, but an infrequent meaning was used in each text. For example, the noun plug most commonly means something that blocks up a hole, or an electrical device inserted into a wall outlet. In this study, the students were given a reading text with plug in the infrequent meaning: a praising advertisement, a favorable mention. The excerpt from the students’ reading text below shows this infrequent meaning: […] But you can’t shake the feeling that it’s all just a big plug for Microsoft’s music store. […] The use of infrequent meanings of common words was key in this study. We intended to make the dictionary look-up process challenging for the participants. We wanted them to think that they knew or recognized a word, then discover upon reading a text that they might not know it. Using the dictionary appropriately would be of great importance if a student were to fully understand a given text. In general, while the participants were familiar with the most common meaning(s) of each word, they usually did not know or had only a vague comprehension of the infrequent meaning represented in the corresponding text. After the students read the text with the infrequent meaning, they were asked whether they knew the meaning of the word, and whether they could tell us the meaning. Then (regardless of their answers) they proceeded to look up the word. Students searched online for the meaning in the dictionary that resembled the meaning in the text. Next, the students were asked further questions, about whether their initial guess was correct, and how their initial guess compared to what they found in the dictionary (Topic 2: Look-up Ability of Participants). The next step was to ask the students questions related to the dictionary examples: about their usefulness, what the participant liked about them, and how they could be made better. One of these questions asked whether the example could be understood without information provided in square brackets “[ ]” (Topic 4: Perceptions of Usefulness and Quality of Dictionary Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 94 Examples). Finally, participants were asked to explain what dictionary information was the most useful to them (Topic 3: Perceptions of Usefulness and Quality of Definitions). 5. Results Topic 1: Habits of dictionary use Our study found that most participants use a dictionary once per week or more; however, one participant uses dictionaries rarely and relies mostly on Google Translate. Those students who use dictionaries do not make discerning choices; they choose whichever online dictionary comes up first on a Google word search. None of the students had ever used the targeted MWLD, at least not that they were aware of. Eight of the nine participants were satisfied with the monolingual dictionaries that they use. The sole participant who expressed dissatisfaction was not discussing dictionaries but Google Translate (though this participant thought they were discussing dictionaries). All but one student stated that they find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently in dictionaries. Topic 2: Look-up ability of participants We mentioned earlier that while the students in this study were proficient in English, they were not English specialists (but rather specialists in some field of economics or business) and did not have the habit of attending to the finer points of language. Given this, it is not surprising that our participants often did not notice the part of speech of the target words as they read them in the short texts; they did not pay attention to whether a targeted word was a noun, verb, adjective, etc. So, when after reading they began looking up a word in the dictionary, the students continued not to notice part of speech. If we asked them, it was likely that the participants did know and could have told us the difference between, for example, a noun and a verb. However, during dictionary look-up, they were not alert to that quite significant difference and most of the time just ignored it. When the students read a word in a text or in the dictionary, they were interested solely in deciphering the meaning. Another problem related to the skill set of this group of students had to do with the form of the target word. It goes without saying that English words in real contexts, particularly verbs, do not always appear in the dictionary in their basic form. For example, a user will not find fixing (verb) at the head of a dictionary entry; instead, they will find fix and are expected to know the relationship between fixing and fix. Unfortunately, what lexicographers think users know is not always what they do know. This was often a factor leading to participants’ failure to find the correct meaning in Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 95 the dictionary. All three of the verb forms in this study - taxed, fixing, and scoring - caused look-up problems for the users, and the form of the target verb was the main reason participants had difficulty locating the correct meaning. Seven of the nine participants did eventually find the correct meaning of the verbs used in their reading texts, but it was time-consuming and difficult for them. Topic 3: Perceptions of usefulness and quality of definitions One of our questions asked participants to indicate the dictionary information that was the most useful to them in understanding the meaning of a word. This question allowed us to glean information about students’ perceptions of definitions. For example, for the verb score, below is an excerpt from the reading text given to the students: Back when Patrick had a job at an auto-parts store and as a banquet server, his morning routine involved driving to Lawrence before work and scoring his daily fix. […] From the nine different meanings in the dictionary, eight of the nine students found the correct definition: slang: to buy or get (illegal drugs) Five of these eight mentioned the usefulness of the phrase illegal drugs in the dictionary definition. For the noun plug, as was noted above, students received the following reading text: […] But you can’t shake the feeling that it’s all just a big plug for Microsoft’s music store. […] One of the six different meanings given in the dictionary reads: something that is said on the radio, on television, etc., in order to create interest in something (such as a book, movie, or restaurant) - often + for Four of the eight students who found this correct meaning mentioned the grammatical information “often + for” as being very useful. It is probable that this information helped the students understand all three of the examples listed in the dictionary, all containing for: ‣ I heard a plug for that café on the radio. ‣ He gave a plug for [=talked about] his new film during the interview. ‣ She put in a plug for the band’s new album on her radio program. Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 96 The perception of a participant that a certain dictionary definition was useful does not always mean that they selected the correct meaning. Sometimes a student who chose the wrong meaning still had a favorable view of the dictionary definition’s usefulness. Participants who picked an incorrect meaning provide us with indirect evidence that the definition might not have been so useful after all. Topic 4: Perceptions of usefulness and quality of dictionary examples We asked several different questions about the example sentences and phrases illustrating word use in the dictionary: what students liked about the examples, whether the examples conveyed the word’s meaning effectively, how the examples could be improved, whether material in square brackets “[ ]” within the examples was useful, and whether students would have understood an example without the material in square brackets. The students noticed and commented on the following aspects of dictionary examples: a) Length The participants stated most often that examples were too short, in particular when they were not in full sentences. In only a single instance during the entire study did a student note that an example was too long. For example, for the noun pitch, four of nine students said that the dictionary example an advertising pitch is too short. One student stated that they don’t like “short segments; ” another explained that the example “lacks context.” Another student considered the example too general: “You can advertise a lot of things; if you don’t know what pitch is, it’s not helpful.” b) Number of dictionary examples The students frequently expressed the desire for a greater number of examples. For example, as was mentioned above, the verb score had one meaning to buy or get (illegal drugs). This was illustrated by two example sentences: [+ object] ‣ He couldn’t score any drugs. [no object] ‣ Druggies come downtown looking to score. In all, for the nine different meanings of the verb score given in the dictionary, there are a total of 16 different examples. In general, the number of Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 97 examples given throughout the online MWLD is relatively high. Nevertheless, the students in this study said that they wanted more. However, when they said they wanted a greater number of examples, it often meant that the examples which were provided did not cover their specific reading text. c) Similarity of wording in examples to wording in the reading texts The most difficult task for these participants was to connect the infrequent meaning of a word in their reading text to the correct related information in the dictionary. Students mentioned often the similarity or dissimilarity of their reading texts to the dictionary examples. In many cases where the researchers considered a dictionary example to be quite obviously similar to a reading text, the participants thought it was not similar. For example, the adjective sharp has one meaning stylish or fashionable in the MWLD. We provided the students with the following text related to this meaning: Her rock ’n’ roll friends might have expected a hip ’n’ cool outfit for her English country wedding. But it was her husband, Jamie Hince, the guitarist from The Kills, in his sharp blue Yves Saint Laurent suit, who brought a touch of musicworld fantasy. The MWLD provided the following three examples, two of which are full sentences and one a phrase: ‣ He’s a sharp dresser. ‣ a sharp outfit ‣ You’re looking very sharp today. While to the researchers these examples were analogous to the reading text that the students received, some of them saw things differently. Several students associated sharp with the color blue after reading the text, and even the above close dictionary examples did not help them grasp the correct meaning of sharp. d) Inclusion of verb forms in dictionary examples We have mentioned how some students struggled to look up verb forms such as fixing or taxed. Verb forms turned out to be relevant when students evaluated the dictionary examples. Participants firmly advocated for examples that would contain a variety of verb forms. And, they preferred to see the specific verb form that appeared in their reading text. For example, here is the reading text that the students received for fixing: Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 98 ROVANIEMI, Finland—A man arrived at the police station here in 2011 with an unusual tip. He told the police that a Singaporean man was fixing matches with the local professional soccer team. The police were incredulous. Of the ten meanings of the verb fix in the MWLD, the correct one for the above text is: to control or affect (something, such as a game or election) in a dishonest way This definition was accompanied by the following examples: ‣ They were accused of fixing games in college. ‣ The election was fixed. ‣ fix a parking ticket [=arrange for someone to not have to pay a fine for parking illegally] One of the examples does have the same form, fixing, that is found in the students’ text. The examples also cover two other forms, fixed and fix. While these are indeed the types of examples students said they liked, if the form of the verb was so misleading to begin with that students could not find the correct meaning, then a good example (from their perspective, such as the one with fixing games above) would still not help them. e) Information in square brackets within examples The majority view among the students was that they preferred having additional information within the dictionary examples, of the type that is usually given in square brackets “[ ]” in the MWLD. For the verb tax, the dictionary listed the following examples, with supplementary phrases in square brackets: ‣ That job really taxed our strength. [=required us to use a lot of physical effort] ‣ All this waiting is taxing my patience. [=is making me lose my patience] ‣ puzzles that tax your brain ‣ You can have an enjoyable vacation without taxing your budget. [=without having to spend a lot of money] One student said: “Additional explanations are helpful because the words are explained once again in a simple way.” For the fourth example above, this same student said that the material in brackets was essential for their understanding. Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 99 f) Use of boldface and italics in dictionary examples Our students were quite sensitive to the use of boldface and italics; their level of awareness was a surprise in the study. Some students said that they did not understand the difference between the use of bold and italics; one student made several guesses, all incorrect, as to what the difference was. Another student said that way the dictionary uses both italics and boldface is “inconsistent.” At times, students expressed appreciation for boldface, because for them it made some information more prominent (cf. Herbst 1996 and Dziemianko 2014 on highlighting word combinations in boldface). For the dictionary entry of the noun plug, one student said (as a compliment) that the boldfaced text “sticks out.” On the other hand, all the students who chose to comment on the issue conveyed their dislike of italics. One student called italics “clutter.” 6. Discussion The answers to questions related to habits indicated that the student-participants use dictionaries, although not as often as lexicographers might like. Participants’ lack of extensive dictionary experience meant that their look-up skills were often not strong enough for them to benefit fully from their interaction with the dictionary. While their look-up problems were sometimes interrelated and (for example) two problems together could contribute to a prolonged or unsuccessful look-up, even one problem by itself could cause a user to make mistakes that cost them time and/ or led to incorrect identification of the meaning. Our participants pointed out that, while dictionaries are created by experts, they can be improved if dictionary makers “can learn something about average users; ” if linguists can “think like the average person.” What follows are recommendations for those involved in learner lexicography. Improving part-of-speech information to make look-up easier During the look-up activities, some participants noticed (and used) the MWLD’s small drop-down menu with parts of speech labeled - and others never did. Those who did use this menu said that it made look-up easier. The drop-down menu as it is currently presented in the online MWLD is not as salient, and thus not as useful as it could be in guiding users to the right part of speech. Among the target words of this study, the most blatant case of the menu being unhelpful is the MWLD’s treatment of mean (see Figure 1), a word than can be used as a noun, verb, or adjective. The first three choices in the seventeen-item drop-down menu are: mean (verb), mean (adjective), and mean (adjective). A user has no way of understanding which of the two visible adjective listings should be selected. Moreover, Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 100 since only three items are visible at a time in this menu, one must use the scrolling arrow on the right to view the additional fourteen choices. Figure 1. Drop-down menu for mean. Improving dictionary examples Our participants wanted full-sentence examples even in cases where most lexicographers would regard a brief phrase as enough. The participants appeared to be saying that it would be better to err on the side of longer rather than shorter examples. The participants’ desire to have the example most similar to their reading text is related to their interest in a larger quantity of examples. Learners have more of a possibility to find the example that works for them if there are more examples. If a dictionary were to provide more examples, then more verb forms such as fixing and taxed could figure within the full series of examples provided; this was another clear desire of the students studied. While the study participants said that they wanted more examples, they also said they do not want too many; this is not as contradictory as it seems. One student suggested the possibility of clicking to receive more examples when desired, or the ability to click on a short example to access a sentence or paragraph. This participant believed that dictionary users should be able “to go deeper” into the information, but that those who do not wish to do so should not be “force[d] … to read everything” on the web page. Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 101 Improving the way dictionary information is presented One participant suggested the use of color to clarify the presentation of information: Different types of information could be in different colors. This idea was actually used in the 2008 print edition of the MWLD, where examples appeared in blue font and definitions in black. For unknown reasons, the use of color did not transfer over to the MWLD online, where the font for examples is now black. Bringing blue back into this dictionary might help learners distinguish between the definition and the examples; adding other colors might further improve the look-up process. One unequivocal message from the students was their aversion to italics. They did not understand why italics were used in the dictionary or how their meaning differs from that of boldface. The participants thought italics caused text to be “unnoticeable; ” they were “old fashioned.” As non-native speakers albeit advanced learners of English, it is possible that italicized text presented comprehension problems for the students in this study. Many sources advise against using italics in readings meant for dyslexic people. 5 The researchers speculate that, in the online environment in which the study participants do most of their reading, italicized text is indeed less visible and prominent. The online environment has multiple means to render text salient, so italics do not appear to be a good choice there, given how poorly they render on a screen. The students said they liked boldface, although their remarks indicated an incomplete or nonexistent understanding of how the dictionary used it. One student (incorrectly) believed that boldface was how the dictionary shows “the reader which example is more appropriate.” 7. What are the takeaways for lexicographers? The first takeaway from this study is that while education in dictionary use is important, it alone will not suffice to increase dictionary use or the understanding of dictionaries among the younger generations. While dictionary instruction is carefully embedded in the formal curriculum in Slovenia, in practice numerous students report that no instruction or very little instruction in dictionaries actually takes place. This might be the reason that one of our participants thought they were using a dictionary (a bad and dissatisfying one) when they were really accessing Google Translate. As dictionaries have moved online, they have lost their distinctness from other available internet tools. And, that distinctness has turned out to be important: In the print era, people had an emotional attachment to their specific print dictionary and were concerned about the correct definitions of words. Today, an online dictionary is just another online resource; it is 5 For example, the British Dyslexia Association (n.d.) advises: “Avoid […] italics as this can make the text appear to run together […] Use bold for emphasis”. Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc 102 there to take or leave. It is certainly the case that current students are completely unaware of the correct way to use learner’s dictionaries - and prefer using mobile phone dictionary apps. Even if further education were provided, it is doubtful that most students would go out of their way to use one online dictionary over another, to compare online dictionaries and decide which they prefer. People have become used to the nondescriptness of the online environment: You type something and go where you are taken by search engines. Using such a powerful and sophisticated tool - as an online learner’s dictionary is - requires habit formation as well as training. A reliable dictionary is better and more authoritative than any random app and using such a dictionary to its full potential would allow users to avoid frustration and obtain more information. This constitutes not only a takehome message for the lexicographers about what users need and want, but it is also a plea for language instructors to do more than pay lip service to teaching students how to use legitimate lexicographic tools properly, for best results. The second takeaway from the Slovenian study is related to the first. While online dictionaries may be perceived as interchangeable by the user, they could - and should - become less nondescript than they are. The online Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary, as a continuation of the 2008 print Merriam-Webster’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary, was not wellserved by its crossover to the online environment. The inadequate dropdown menu and the lack of color to distinguish some parts of the entry (something that exists in the printed book) are only two of several areas in need of improvement. As an online tool, the MWLD is less useful than it could be and does not fulfill the promise of the online environment. In other spheres of its endeavors, the Merriam-Webster company deserves praise for rendering its dictionaries more distinct and more significant to the public. The company and its lexicographers are often in the news in the U.S. because of their quality reporting on words that are trending in online dictionary look-ups. For example, on September 10, 2021, look-ups of the word mandate spiked 500%, as Merriam-Webster maintains, “following President Biden’s speech on new efforts to increase rates of vaccination.” 6 Merriam’s postings on trending words are in sync with high-interest social and political events and demonstrate unequivocally that words - and dictionaries - matter. On the other hand, the potential of the Merriam learner’s dictionary is not being realized. The participants in our study had high expectations of how the online dictionary environment should look, what types of information should be in it, and how they wanted that information delivered to them. They reported to us that, prior to taking part in the Slovenian study, their own look-up efforts sometimes ended in dissatisfaction. Certainly, during the 6 https: / / www.merriam-webster.com/ news-trend-watch/ biden-vaccine-mandates- 20210910. Reflections on the Slovenian Dictionary User Study of 2018 103 study they demonstrated a great sensitivity to a variety of dictionary elements and sometimes expressed discouragement with what they found. Nevertheless, the students said that they enjoyed using the online Merriam- Webster Learner’s Dictionary overall; many of them planned to continue using it. Their perceptions are valuable to lexicographers who aim to improve the content, format, and presentation of information in learner’s dictionaries. The Slovenian study is a reminder that the stakes are high; the dictionary needs to stand out amid the pervasive noise that the online environment represents. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper, “Reflections on the Slovenian User Study: What Does It Tell Us? ” was read at the October 2019 EMLex Autumn Meeting and Colloquium, held by the Lexicographic Centre, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. The authors acknowledge the grant project, Dictionary User Groups: What They Can Teach Lexicographers (BI-US/ 17-18-033), which was financially supported by the Slovenian Research Agency. They also acknowledge the approval (2 March 2018) of the New Jersey City University (NJCU) Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Participants in Research, and the approval (5 March 2018) of the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Donna Farina thanks NJCU for travel support to Ljubljana, Slovenia. Last and most importantly, the authors are very grateful to the study participants from undergraduate programs in the School of Economics and Business at the University of Ljubljana. 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Online dictionaries - how do users find them and what do they do once they have? In: Ruth Valtvedt Fjeld & Julie Matilde Torjusen (Eds.). Proceedings of the 15 th EURALEX International Congress. Oslo: Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. 654-660. Müller-Spitzer, Carolin, Alexander Koplenig & Sascha Wolfer (2018). Dictionary usage research in the Internet era. In: Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Lexicography. Milton Park, New York: Routledge: 715- 734. Qu, Sandy Q. & John Dumay (2011). The qualitative research interview. Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management 8 (3): 238-264. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1108/ 11766091111162070 Rundell, Michael (1998). Recent trends in English pedagogical lexicography. International Journal of Lexicography 11 (4): 315-342. Rundell, Michael (2012). Stop the presses: The end of the printed dictionary. Macmillan Dictionary Blog. 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Farina New Jersey City University Marjeta Vrbinc University of Ljubljana Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education A critical discourse overview Ricardo Römhild This contribution aims to provide an overview of current concepts of film literacies in the (English) language classroom in Germany. Against the background of a working definition of film literacies, three central models are being discussed with regards to their general composition, highlighted aspects, and potential blind spots. These models are Blell and Lütge’s (2008) notion of Filmbildung; Blell, Grünewald, Kepser and Surkamp’s (2016b) comprehensive study of film in language education; and Viebrock’s (2016) concept of film literacy in English language teaching. In addition, this contribution also takes into account further contributions to the discourse on film-based language education, with a particular focus on multiliteracies-informed approaches and approaches to cultural learning with films. To conclude this overview, the article highlights central insights gained from the discussion and points to open desiderata in the field. 1. Introduction: aims and scope of this contribution Films have been a fixed component of English language classrooms in Germany for years, and there is a host of literature available to educators and researchers who wish to engage with this text form in the context of English language education (ELE) in Germany. This contribution may serve those interested in conceptualisations of film literacy as an overview of existing approaches. It also aims to identify desiderata and potential for further research that emerge from the latest developments in the field. To that end, this contribution features a brief discussion of terminology (section 2), which seeks to both disentangle the various terms used to denote what is here called film literacies, such as film competence and film comprehension, AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2024-0005 Ricardo Römhild 108 and to provide a baseline for the critical discussion of the film literacies concepts. The following section 3 introduces three concepts in detail: Blell and Lütge’s (2008) notion of Filmbildung; Blell, Grünewald, Kepser and Surkamp’s (2016b) comprehensive study of film in language education; and Viebrock’s (2016) concept of film literacy in English language teaching. It also touches upon multiliteracies-informed approaches and contributions on cultural learning with films. Section 4 concludes this overview, highlighting central insights gained from the discussion and pointing to further research potential in the field of film literacies in (English) language education. 2. Film literacies vs. film competence - a note on terminology The discourse on conceptualisation of film-related abilities in (English) language education features a variety of terms that are commonly used to refer to these abilities, such as film literacy, film competence, and film comprehension. However, there seems to be considerable confusion as to how exactly these terms differ from one another 1 . For instance, while Hallet (2016: 183-184) highlights the social, participatory, critical, and discursive value of the literacy concept in the context of film, it seems as though he uses the terms competence and literacy interchangeably. This might merely be an issue of how two highly complex notions are translated into German. 2 However, upon closer inspection, there seems to be an important distinction between the notion of literacy and competence which prohibits a straightforward equalisation. As Zydatiß (2008: 17) points out, while the notion of competence remains a rather fuzzy one in the Bildungsstandards, it is nonetheless simultaneously associated with concrete goals that learners can achieve: “learners can combine information derived from the text and from external sources; ” “learners can employ appropriate strategies for solving comprehension problems” (KMK 2014: 15; author’s translation). Given the idea that film as a medium keeps evolving - as do the societies, cultures, and contexts in which learners live -, the question arises as to whether it is possible to speak of conclusively achievable goals at all. The notion of completion is inherent to the (narrow) concept of competence but not to the concept of literacy, as expressed by the idea of learning by design (Kress 2003; Kalantzis et al. 2016: 220-223). 1 This section is based on a chapter in Römhild 2023. 2 In some instances, Hallet (e.g., 2016) and other authors use the term Filmverstehen (literally: film comprehension or understanding film), which serves to prove the point that translating literacy into German can be difficult - Hallet describes this choice of word as “awkward” himself (Hallet 2016: 177; ungelenk in the German original). Filmverstehen, however, is an unfortunate term, as it implies a rather strong focus on reception, in lieu of language production and active discourse participation. Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 109 According to Kalantzis et al., “we live in a world of designs,” that is “patterns of meaning available to us in the form of our cultural and environmental heritage - the conventions of language, imagery, sound, gesture, touch and space” (2016: 221). In interacting and engaging with these “resources for meaning” (Kalantzis et al. 2016: 222), learners transform these available designs - and themselves -, “remaking the world by designing it afresh” (Kalantzis et al. 2016: 222). This may take the form of representing meaning to oneself (reading, listening, viewing something) or by communicating with other people. The authors highlight that “this is the reason why, when we design, we never simply replicate available designs. We always rework and revoice the world as found” (Kalantzis et al. 2016: 222). The products of this process are “tangible, communicated trace[s], such as an image, an object, an oral utterance or a written text” (Kalantzis et al. 2016: 223). These products, these re-designs, now join the entirety of available designs and enrich them, rendering the whole process a circle of meaning-making and transformation. There is no definite conclusion. In this light, films can be thought of as designs, which is corroborated by the notion of films existing within their ‘media milieu’ expressed by Weber (2019), that is, films are defined by a complex interplay, which includes processes of their production, distribution, and reception. Arguably, the notion of film literacy (as opposed to film competence) inherently connects learning with and about film to education which is not geared explicitly towards practising and perpetuating existing circumstances but is instead geared towards transforming them (Decke-Cornill 2016: 68). This is the first of several reasons for the use of the term film literacies in its plural form rather than film literacy: It is a means of disambiguation in light of the common synonymous use of competence and literacy. In recent years, a commonly found translation of German Kompetenz has been literacy (see, e.g., Hallet 2016; Viebrock 2016). A more comprehensive, broader notion of competence - as opposed to a narrow one - would approximate a notion of literacy as advocated within the multiliteracies framework. The term film literacies more obviously signifies conceptual proximity to multiliteracies pedagogy: A multiliteracies-informed notion of film literacies adds to the more reflexive elements of Filmbildung (Blell & Lütge 2008) the more pronounced idea of active social and discursive participation not only in but also through film (see Nash 2014: 387; Römhild 2022). Being ‘world-literate,’ as it were, is key to participation in times characterised by immediate communication and powerful global discourses and can thus be regarded as an essential cultural technique of the 21st century, which is also true for film-related discourses. Another reason arises from the fact that this notion of literacies goes far beyond the original meaning of literacy - to be able to read and write - and comprises understanding and producing texts on different levels, using different text formats, genres, and semiotic modes of meaning-making. Engaging with Ricardo Römhild 110 film is a highly complex process and it is not possible to pinpoint one single literacy required by students in this context. Rather, it is more appropriate to speak of a multitude of literacies involved in this process. To conclude, the term film literacies carries transformative, criticallyparticipative, social, cultural, multimodal, and communicative/ discursive elements (for a more elaborated derivation, see Römhild 2023). It is against this background that the next section provides an overview of current concepts of film literacies in the German ELE discourse and discusses them critically. 3. Current concepts of film literacies in Germany This section discusses the three most recent and comprehensive concepts of film literacies available in the current discourse in Germany: Blell and Lütge’s (2008) notion of Filmbildung; Blell, Grünewald, Kepser and Surkamp’s (2016b) comprehensive study of film in language education; and Viebrock’s (2016) concept of film literacy in English language teaching. These three notions lend themselves to detailed examination because they provide a general overview of the discourse and reflect the evolution of ideas surrounding film literacies in ELE (and beyond). Blell and Lütge’s article can be regarded as one of the earliest, wide-ranging suggestions for employing films in the English language classroom, whereas Blell et al. (2016b) and Viebrock (2016) have put forth the most recent comprehensive studies in this context. It is worth noting that, having been published in the same year, these two conceptualisations assume somewhat special roles in a discourse that normally does not feature ‘competing’ concepts. That said, there is notable difference between the two, both in terms of origins - Blell et al. (2016b) write from a perspective of all language subjects taught at German schools, whereas Viebrock (2016) gears her concept towards ELE specifically - and in terms of substantive focus. As such, the three designs provide points of reference for other contributions to the discourse, which have influenced the contouring of these concepts over the years. 3.1. Filmbildung in foreign language education - Blell and Lütge 2008 The concept of Filmbildung in foreign language education, put forth by Blell and Lütge (2008), represents one of the earlier contributions to the “development of an all-encompassing model of film education transcending conventional approaches towards films in the EFL classroom” (2008: 124; author’s translation). Based on the premise that a sole focus on analysis and understanding is insufficient when dealing with films in the language classroom, their understanding of Filmbildung is defined as film-related agency, Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 111 which is characterised by active experience, critical and nuanced perception, (inter)cultural viewing and listening, autonomy, creativeness and interculturality. An underlying conviction of this concept is that the only way to overcome the “dualism of film object and viewer subject” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 126) is via an approach that integrates both Filmerleben and film analysis, thereby enabling the students to both actively experience and understand media and analogue worlds. Against the background of this understanding, the authors present a “multifunctional, actionand processoriented approach” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 127), which essentially consists of five subordinate educational goals associated with film. Importantly, the authors add, these areas can only really come into effect in praxis by interplay and mutual supplementation. Bell and Lütge’s concept can be understood as the joint product of then existing approaches to teaching and learning with film, as it includes the areas of experiencing film (“Filmerleben”), visual literacy (“Sehverstehen”), audio-visual literacy (“Hör- / Sehverstehen”), critical film analysis (“Filmanalyse/ -kritik”), and (inter-) cultural visual literacy/ intercultural learning (“(Inter-)Kulturelles Sehverstehen & Interkulturelles Lernen”) (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128). Fig. 1. Filmbildung in foreign language education (translation of Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). Ricardo Römhild 112 As indicated by Figure 1, the experience-oriented notion of Filmerleben constitutes the basis of an interdependent progression. Here, it is defined as “the ability to experience film intuitively and associatively, and to process film with an orientation towards communication” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). In considering this aspect, the authors respond accordingly to demands previously issued by Maurer (2006) as well as Decke- Cornill and Luca (2007). Blell and Lütge (2008: 130) warn against the suppression of fascination aspects when dealing with film, as had previously been the case in the formerly dominant media pedagogic discourses informed by Frankfurt school’s aesthetic theory. These discourses favour critically analytical approaches and a more distanced attitude towards film, thus marginalising film experience as “senseless identification and affirmation” (Rosebrock 2004: 113; author’s translation). Turning towards more subject-oriented notions, Blell and Lütge (2008: 130) open their concept of film education for an understanding of meaning-making as an interactive process, rather than a textually determined one, thus acknowledging the active role assumed by the recipients. The area of experiencing film, in their concept, comprises the students’ capability of emotional, non-verbal, and verbal reactions and personal opinions as well as the ability to transfer the film experience into creative and active media work, which includes all types of media (2008: 128). The second and third areas, visual literacy and audio-visual literacy, are deliberately listed as separate entities, although the authors emphasise that all literacy areas are closely connected to one another. Based on the works of Schwerdtfeger (1989, 2002), Blell and Lütge (2004), Surkamp (2004a), and Seidl (2007), Blell and Lütge (2008: 127) stress the importance of visual literacy development when it comes to the construction of identity and subjectivity from the perspective of perceptive and cognitive psychology. They explain that the active perception and differentiation of images necessitate much more complex meaning-making processes than corresponding everyday practices and therefore need to be developed systematically (2008: 127). In accordance with Thaler (2007), they claim that the same is true for the development of audio-visual literacy (Blell & Lütge 2008: 127). In this concept, visual literacy is defined as “the ability to (actively) perceive moving (and static) images, to comprehend them in a nuanced way, and to process them with an orientation towards communication” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). It comprises a focus on communication and meaning-making processes, basic film-related knowledge, and an “attitude of critical attention towards the manipulation of perception, thinking, and action” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). Similarly, audio-visual literacy is defined as “the ability to view, listen to, and understand image-guided contents in a foreign language as well as to process these contents with an orientation towards communication” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). This area includes the “development of perception, storage, and processing of Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 113 simultaneous or successive audio/ video relationships” and the “development of receptive and productive autonomy in the foreign language” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). Blell and Lütge (2008: 128) also list the “development of narrative competence” under audio-visual literacy. However, the understanding suggested by Blell and Lütge seems to revolve primarily around the acquisition of declarative knowledge (historical knowledge and knowledge of typical plots; see 2008: 128) and thus needs to be expounded on, beyond the domain of knowledge, to include attitudinal and action-oriented components. Their fourth aspect of Filmbildung is critical film analysis, which they define as “the ability to analyse moving images semiotically and to understand them through interpretation” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). 3 This comprises the “ability to critically and aesthetically analyse and evaluate film contents,” as well as the “development of an awareness for manipulative effects of filmic forms of representation” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). The fact that the term “manipulation” is mentioned twice in the context of this concept seems noteworthy - especially in the context of trying to reconcile the two areas of experiencing film and analysing film critically. The construct does not offer a conclusive solution to this problem, but it also does not seem to be geared towards working with films that have traditionally been associated with manipulation, such as documentaries, for instance. Nonetheless, the question as to how to consistently integrate both experience-oriented and critically analytical approaches to film deserves more attention, as the discourse surrounding claims of reality and truth in documentary films merely amplifies the issue that already exists in the context of feature films. The final component of Blell and Lütge’s concept is (inter)cultural visual literacy and intercultural learning, the “ability to read films as (pop) cultural artefacts and to interpret them within the interplay of one’s own and foreign cultures of reference” (2008: 128; author’s translation). This includes the “ability to analyse filmic mediation of cultural and social circumstances of both one’s own and foreign visual cultures,” and the “development of cultural visual literacy in an area of tension between the visuality of image-producing and -receiving cultures and the fostering of understanding differences [Fremdverstehen; the author]” (Blell & Lütge 2008: 128; author’s translation). The evidently strong focus on intercultural competences in this model, and the differentiation between one’s own and foreign cultures in particular, proves to be highly problematic in an age characterised by processes of cultural hybridity and fluidity. Hence, 3 It is a curious thought that critical film analysis includes the ability to analyse films semiotically, but that visual literacy and audio-visual literacy are singled out as separate competence areas, which arguably address capabilities associated with semiotic modes of meaning-making. This primacy of audio and visual modes over others is a tendency that can be observed in various contributions to concepts of film literacies as well; see, for instance, Viebrock (2016). Ricardo Römhild 114 this focus has since been criticised and revoked by both authors (see, e.g., Blell & Doff 2014; Lütge 2013a, 2015). Together, these five components constitute a learning progression that aims at and is embedded in the overall objective of Filmbildung, which, in turn, is influenced by and oriented towards the principles of cultural studies (Blell & Lütge 2008: 127). Blell and Lütge highlight the merit of multiple points of intersection between cultural studies and film didactics for the development of film literacy concepts with a focus on cultural learning (2008: 133). They conceptualise film in a field of tension between intertextuality (Hallet 2002) and an extended notion of text (Bachmann-Medick 2007), visuality, the iconic turn and visual culture (Seidl 2007), as well as performativity (Huber 2004) and a “culture of performance” (Bachmann- Medick 2007: 104), all of which point toward a consistent consideration of cultural aspects when dealing with film in educational settings. Furthermore, the authors briefly discuss autonomous learning with film online, which hints at the then slowly evolving awareness of the significance of digitalisation processes for film studies and film didactics. However, while these deliberations might represent cautious steps toward an opening of film didactics for the ideas of multiliteracies pedagogy - in particular, the notions of multimodality and learning by design - these potentially fertile ideas seem to not have been pursued consistently in conceptions of film literacy until much later. To sum up, Blell and Lütge’s concept of Filmbildung comprises a number of dimensions: perceptive competences, aesthetic and critical competences, intercultural competences, and communicative competences. The authors build on product-oriented, semiotic, cultural, and linguistic aspects (in accordance with Zerweck 2007: 361) as well as experience-oriented components (in accordance with Decke-Cornill & Luca 2007; Maurer 2006). The result is a concept that integrates two ways of perceiving films - analytically and subject-oriented -, both of which carry distinct implications for the employment of films in the language classroom. Blell and Lütge stress that working with films must always be embedded affectively and cognitively (2008: 129). As such, one of the most noteworthy contributions of this concept is the focus on experiencing film - Filmerleben - and its consistent integration in what constitutes Filmbildung. Regarding the potential compatibility of this concept with the idea that films are multimodal designs, it seems peculiar that the authors opted for such a clear defection from the ideas of multiliteracies pedagogy and instead favoured mentioning the multiliteracies concept as another example of how cultural studies might be reconciled with film didactics (Blell & Lütge 2008: 133), without pursuing the integration of these notions. The final observation concerns the apparent balance between a focus on film reception and analysis, on the one hand, and film-related communication and production or action orientation on the other. While the bottom three competence areas (see Figure 1) integrate understanding and production, the upper two areas, Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 115 critical film analysis in particular, focus primarily on interpretation and thus seem to prioritise receptive processes over productive ones, which is something worth discussing in light of alternative conceptualisations of the relationship between film analysis, student reception and communicative production. 3.2. Film in language education - Blell, Grünewald, Kepser and Surkamp 2016 In the endeavour to address the research gap regarding models of film didactics specifically geared toward usage across language subjects at schools, Blell, Grünewald, Kepser and Surkamp (2016b) put forth their notion of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural film education (see Figure 2 below). A more compact version of the publication’s introduction was published by Blell and Surkamp (2016), with the particular line of argumentation being rooted slightly more in ELE research. In both cases, the authors seek to offer a concept which does justice to both subject-specific and film-specific competences, taking into account media pedagogic demands. As such, their concept is meant to cultivate enjoyment, autonomy, and critical reflection whenever students actively engage with film, which they call “a cultural field of action” (kulturelles Handlungsfeld Film; Blell et al. 2016b: 18; see also Blell & Surkamp 2016: 13). This goal is combined with both a task-based approach to teaching and learning languages and an extended notion of competence (in the sense of going beyond the categorisation of film competence as a set of skills), rendering the entire concept extremely compatible with Hallet’s notion of complex-competence tasks (Blell & Surkamp 2016: 18). As with the concept introduced above (Blell & Lütge 2008), Blell et al. (2016b) build on existing ideas in film didactics to integrate the most potent approaches, referencing the works of Blell and Lütge (2008), Grünewald (2009, 2011, 2015), Leitzke- Ungerer (2009), Kepser (2010), Henseler, Möller and Surkamp (2011), Abraham (2012), and Lütge (2012). One of their central goals was to provide educators with means of engaging their students in learning processes with and about films, as a medium and as an object of investigation (Blell et al. 2016b: 19). Ricardo Römhild 116 Fig. 2. Film competence areas (translation of Blell, Grünewald, Kepler & Surkamp 2016b: 41; author’s translation). The concept’s centrepiece is formed by the competence area labelled “experiencing film, using film, understanding film” (Blell et al. 2016b: 20), which addresses the emotional, pragmatic, and cognitive dimensions of learning with and about film. There are three underlying key premises associated with this area. Firstly, the authors stress that aesthetic film analysis, that is, a focus on the text or the object, should never be regarded as an end in itself, but it should always be geared functionally towards the understanding and interpretation, usage and enjoyment of film, which includes the recognition of a film’s historical and cultural context (Blell et al. 2016b: 20). Blell and Surkamp explain, “a film text can only be made accessible beyond the scope of one’s own reception perspective and be interpreted as a means of cultural expression if its contextual references are taken into account” (2016: 13; author’s translation). Overly fastidious critics could argue that this idea is not convincingly displayed in the visual representation (Figure 2), as the illustration implies or at least leaves too much room for the possibility of separating analysis and contextualisation, despite a small area of overlap and the verbal description. Secondly, and closely connected to this first aspect, the concept takes into consideration the communicative aspects of learning with and about film. The authors highlight the fact that films work towards personality development by triggering follow-up communication in the lifeworld of learners (Blell et al. 2016b: 21). With these two claims comes a revocation of the primacy of receptive competences: Instead of being the sole motivation for working with films in the classroom, film reception becomes a necessary sub-process of a broader understanding of film literacies, which is thus not only Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 117 conceptualised as an analytical category but also includes subject-orientated aspects (experiencing and enjoying film; film-related follow-up communication). What also becomes apparent is a strong affinity to the educational objective of discourse competence because an understanding of film literacies, which is actionand product-oriented - in other words, which involves the act of communication -, facilitates students’ active participation in film-related discourses (Blell et al. 2016b: 21; see also Blell & Surkamp 2016: 17). Thirdly, the strong connection between experiencing film (Filmerleben) and analysing film (Filmverstehen) is a key aspect of this concept. The former two premises have already hinted at this relationship, but it becomes even more evident in light of the fact that recipients do not simply extract information from texts (including films) but play an active role in the construction of meaning. This results in the necessity of including student-oriented, creative elements into the learning process, which may also take the form of film-related learning products, thus fostering an understanding of how films are being produced and distributed (Blell et al. 2016b: 22). Based on these deliberations, the following four competence fields are outlined, which constitute the area of “experiencing film, using film, understanding film” (Blell et al. 2016b: 20): film analysis, film design, film contextualisation, and film-related communication (Blell et al. 2016b: 22). The field of film-related communication is a unique feature of this concept as it encompasses and transgresses the other three fields. Defining descriptors for this field (see Blell et al. 2016b: 26-27), the authors include receptive, reflective, and productive aspects, following both an object-focused as well as a subject-focused understanding of film. In order to be able to fully enjoy films, students need to understand the text, which includes different modes of meaning-making. Blell et al. (2016b: 24) list listening and viewing, which includes reading (subtitles, for instance), as well as contextual knowledge, such as film history or literary knowledge. Being able to communicate about a film then also requires the ability to produce (written or oral) language, to talk about what has been seen or heard. This includes film-specific terminology in terms of aesthetics and narration. The authors also take into account plurilingual competences, as a number of films nowadays feature a variety of languages. Film analysis focuses on the identification, labelling, description, and interpretation of film-specific techniques and means of design (Blell et al. 2016b: 28). Importantly, the authors do not refer to the technical, in-depth analysis of films that seems to dominate many approaches of film analysis. Rather, their understanding of film analysis is informed by the connection between analysis and making one’s own reactions to a film explicable, allowing students to pose more complex questions about the film and to reflect on their own viewing habits. This area also entails knowledge of genre and film theory, which includes a so-called “fictionality competence” (Fiktionalitätskompetenz; Blell et al. 2016b: 30; see also Rössler 2010). This Ricardo Römhild 118 refers to the ability to assess a text’s level of fictionality, which helps students to strike a balance between emotional involvement in the fictional world and an awareness for the constructedness of this world. According to the authors, this includes knowledge on typical factuality signals or on “the manipulative effect of certain camera angles” (Blell et al. 2016b: 30). Descriptors for this area also consider aspects of analysing reactions to films, that is, an analysis of the (own) reception process (Blell et al. 2016b: 32). The inclusion of the third area, contextualising film, has wide-ranging implications for teaching and learning with film in the language classroom. As has been stated above and will also be revisited in section 3.4 below, this idea strongly ties cultural learning to film education. Blell et al. state, [behind] every film we receive lie technical, economic, political and social structures (Mikos 2008: 294), which have grown historically and culturally. But films are not only made under specific cultural and historical circumstances, the recipients are also embedded in very individual, social and cultural contexts, through the lenses of which they experience and understand films. (2016b: 32; author’s translation) The authors also mention a film’s intertextual relations as a possible source of contextualisation (Blell et al. 2016b: 33), which ties in with Weber’s idea of a film being part of a ‘media milieu,’ as discussed in section two of this contribution. Summing up the components of this field, Blell et al. (2016b: 35) offer the following list: ‣ reflecting film within media society ‣ identifying and discussing intertextual and inter-medial relations ‣ understanding and interpreting film as a means of cultural expression (cultural learning) ‣ using film for interand transcultural learning The last field described in the context of this concept is film design. Based on a discussion of existing models of media competences (Baacke 1997; Groeben 2004; Landeskonferenz MedienBildung 2010, 2015), Blell et al. (2016b: 36) include the active designing of films in their concept and point out that language is an integral part of all sub-processes (planning, production, post-production, presentation). However, they also note that one cannot favour one sign system over the other - in this case it would be written or oral language over other modes of communication. Instead, they opt for an integrated understanding of different modes, including images and sound design (Blell et al. 2016b: 36). Their understanding of ‘designing film,’ in the context of language education, though, is not to be regarded as preparation for a career in film. They explain that rather than placing Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 119 the sole focus on product-orientation, this field represents both action and product orientation and, in addition, a “subject-oriented acquisition of the self and the world through individual, creative activities” (Blell et al. 2016b: 37). 3.3. Film literacy in English Language Education - Viebrock 2016 In Feature Films in English Language Teaching, Viebrock presents a concept (Figure 3) which defines film literacy as “the learners’ ability to critically and autonomously deal with feature films in the English language classroom, either in a receptive or in a productive mode” (2016: 17). Based on various approaches to teaching and learning with film, including the findings of Blell and Lütge (2008) as well as Lütge (2012), this notion conceptualises film literacy as being “characterised by a discrepancy between a more holistic approach (individual perception) and a cognitive approach (detailed analysis)” (Viebrock 2016: 17-18). There are two major competence areas - perceptive competences as well as aesthetic and critical competences - and another, albeit bracketed area, which takes the cultural dimension of film literacy into account. Regarding communicative or language-related aspects, the process of film literacy development is contextualised by a distinction of BICS - basic interpersonal communicative skills - needed beforehand, and CALP - cognitive academic language proficiency - , aspired to be the outcome of film-based lesson units, with Viebrock explaining that “communicative competences are a prerequisite and an objective of film literacy at the same time” (2016: 18). Fig. 3. Model of film literacy (Viebrock 2016: 17). Ricardo Römhild 120 One of the key assumptions underlying Viebrock’s concept is that “not only do learners have to be able to read and write in a classical sense, they also have to be able to decode, and possibly produce, all kinds of visual images and all kinds of combinations of different semiotic systems” (2016: 13). Thus, the theoretical foundation for her approach to learning with film is multiliteracies pedagogy (see, e.g., The New London Group 2000; Kalantzis et al. 2016), acknowledging the fact that “films are multimodal texts themselves” (Viebrock 2016: 13), although a strong focus on the audio-visual aspects of film becomes evident when she continues, “that usually combine visual images and sound in a particular way.” However, the (visualised) concept itself yields some inconsistencies with this theoretical foundation, as is discussed below. A central element of Viebrock’s film literacy notion is the distinction of relevant competence areas. Perceptive competences address the interaction between the film and individual meaning-making processes as well as a general understanding of the interplay of cinematographic aspects such as camera perspective, sound, and mis-en scène (Viebrock 2016: 18). These perceptive competences “lay the foundations for aesthetic and critical competences, which focus on film as a work of art and the specifics of the medium” (Viebrock 2016: 18). The author argues that it is necessary to recognize certain cinematographic features of a film and describe their effects with appropriate technical terminology in order to detect possible manipulative influences (Viebrock 2016: 18). This view is supported by other authors working in the field of film didactics (see for example Blell & Lütge 2008; Küchler 2009; Grimm 2009, 2015; Lütge 2012). Elaborating on perceptive competences, Viebrock argues for the reformulation of one of Blell and Lütge’s (2008) central goals, that is the development of students’ visual literacy. She observes that “it would probably be more appropriate to speak of multimodal literacies” (2016: 16) and defines these as consisting of “general knowledge as well as knowledge about the construction and organisation of film” (2016: 16). However, it remains unclear as to which other modes of meaning-making are considered to be relevant. Furthermore, multimodal competences seem to be classified exclusively as knowledge. This decision might be traced back to Thaler’s (2014) adaptation of Byram’s (1997) ICC model for film didactics, which resulted in the three domains of attitudes, knowledge, and skills, 4 and which also seems to form the basis for Viebrock’s concept (see Viebrock 2016: 17). This connection is only implied in the text but not explicitly confirmed. 5 However, forcing 4 This tripartition is a common feature of the concept of competence, which is another indicator for the proximity of the terms literacy and competence in this particular concept. 5 As such, it also remains unclear whether Viebrock’s film literacy concept adapts Thaler’s (2014) understanding of the attitudinal domain, which “covers the polarity between a holistic perception or the enjoyment of films and a more critical attitude expressed in aesthetic judgments [sic! ]” (Viebrock 2016: 17). Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 121 the highly complex process of multimodal meaning-making into any one category - Viebrock opts for knowledge without conclusively explaining this decision - cannot do justice to this multi-facetted construct, especially with regard to films that also feature digital dimensions, such as accompanying websites, for example. Rather, speaking in terms of the attitudesknowledge-skills paradigm, one would assume that multimodal competences themselves comprise knowledge, a set of skills, and attitudinal elements and would defy exclusive categorisation into any of these domains. A potential solution to this problem can be found elsewhere in the visual representation, in the shape of an externalisation of integral aspects (not only of multimodal competences but of film literacy in general) to the domain of skills, which are predominantly defined in terms of Cummins’ (2008) distinction between BICS and CALP (Viebrock 2016: 18). Upon closer inspection, this choice proves problematic in at least two regards. Firstly, as discussed in section 2 of this contribution, a narrow definition of competences based on the domains of attitudes, knowledge, and skills, in particular, is not an adequate approach to modelling film literacy as a combination of highly complex literacies. Secondly, the division of communicative proficiency into BICS and CALP implies low proficiency if a student’s communication remains on a BICS level and high proficiency if a student reaches the CALP level. It might be tempting for educators, then, to project language proficiency onto other proficiency areas such as content or methodology as well. This assumption, however, is misleading. A student’s understanding of a given topic or discourse cannot be concluded from the level of their language proficiency (and vice versa). Moreover, “language,” Meyer, Coyle, Halbach, Schuck and Ting (2015: 50) write, “relates to the situation, context and purpose of use.” Communication can occur on different levels of a proficiency continuum between the poles of novice and expert. Switching registers, so to say, can be regarded as part of a larger communicative competence, which is not considered in the rigid concepts of BICS and CALP. Consider the example of eco-documentaries, where students are not only required to master relevant film-specific terminology but also context-specific ecological language, such as terminology associated with climate change. To ultimately assume active roles in the global discourse on, in this example, climate change, students need to be able to express their thoughts using both simple and casual explanations (novice level) as well as complex and detailed explanations (expert level), and everything in between. What is needed in the language classroom, therefore, are task progressions founded in an integrative understanding of language proficiency. Meyer et al. conclude that when the strands that make up subject-specific literacies are identified and subsequently worked into task progressions, this does not separate out language from content and cognition, but rather sees all of them as part of the same Ricardo Römhild 122 process which is knowledge building and meaning-making or simply effective learning (2015: 50-51). Apart from the discussion of multimodality and the conceptualisation of communicative competences in this notion of film literacy, the distinction between an “analytical dimension” (i.e., film analysis; Viebrock 2016: 14) and the holistic perception of films (i.e., Filmerleben) deserves attention as well. Here, the analytical dimension “comprises considerations on three different concepts: media criticism or social criticism, an aesthetic approach, and viewer response theory” (Viebrock 2016, 14-15). According to Viebrock, “media criticism […], by way of comparing novels and their filmic adaptations, aims at a critical attitude towards visual media in opposition to a more positive attitude towards a culture of reading” (2016: 15). Following this approach also encourages critical reflection on mechanisms of film, including “a profound acquisition of specific technical terminology for film analysis” (Viebrock 2016: 15). While the exact nature of those critical elements remains opaque, their consideration resonates with demands for the development of autonomous, critical film reception raised in the other concepts discussed previously (Blell & Lütge 2008; Blell et al. 2016b). The second influential concept, the aesthetic approach by Decke- Cornill and Luca (2007) contributes the goal of “analysing filmic devices and their functions without necessarily including social critique” (Viebrock 2016: 15). As has been mentioned in the context of Blell et al.’s (2016b) understanding, analysing filmic devices, seemingly for the sake of it, that is, detached from any socio-cultural context, is potentially problematic. The third concept cited by the author is viewer response theory, which is treated as “a film-specific analogy to reader response theory […] initially applied to film studies by Bredella (2004[a])” (Viebrock 2016: 15). This inclusion of viewer response theory (see, e.g., Bredella 2004b, 2004c; Bredella & Burwitz-Meltzer 2004; see also Delanoy 2004; Rosenblatt 1978, 1981) in Viebrock’s concept yields important implications for the significance of student-oriented aspects and the understanding of Filmerleben. According to Viebrock, Decke-Cornill and Luca’s (2007) distinction of a more holistic perception (Filmerleben), including the associated emotional aspects, as a separate category from analytical approaches renders true that Filmerleben would be rather improbable to achieve, as it would have to be interpreted as a “naturalistic full-length presentation of feature films comparable to cinema showings” (Viebrock 2016: 15). Therefore, it seems that the category of film analysis, as presented in Figure 3, is assumed to include subject-oriented aspects, since it is partially informed by Bredella’s notion of viewer response, which “with its focus on the viewer could comprise elements of a more holistic perception,” according to Viebrock (2016: 15). Viebrock conceptualises the process of film reception as “characterised by a discrepancy between a holistic approach (individual perception) and a Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 123 cognitive approach (detailed analysis)” (2016: 17-18). With this understanding, this concept of film literacy contradicts Decke-Cornill and Luca’s (2007) call for the integration of objectand subject-oriented approaches, that is, analytical and holistic approaches, in that it opts for a rather clear distinction of the two. The film literacy notion examined here features one competence area not yet touched upon: the bracketed area of cultural studies in Viebrock’s concept. Critiquing the inclusion of intercultural competences in Blell & Lütge’s (2008) notion of film literacy, Viebrock disagrees with the choice of terminology of “‘one’s own’ and ‘foreign’ cultural phenomena” as well as “‘target culture’ as opposed to ‘one’s own culture’” (2016: 16). She argues that today’s societies are characterised by hybridity and fluidity. “As a consequence,” she continues, “I would do without the concept of intercultural learning” (2016: 17). However, the author later adds that [in] my understanding, the exploitation of feature films for cultural studies and/ or film studies is not necessarily part of a basic version of film literacy, but rather an additional dimension of a more elaborate concept, which is predominantly applicable to such films whose topics are not universal, but feature specific historical, political, or social events of a particular region. (Viebrock 2016: 18) This statement raises new questions about the role of cultural learning when dealing with film in general, and a whole host of sub-genres, such as eco-documentaries, in particular. Employing eco-documentaries for illustration once more, one would assume that climate change as a global issue allows for discussions of cultural hybridity and fluidity. For instance, Lütge argues that films can serve as global interfaces, “transgressing culture boundaries and conflicts and turning into a collective learning experience” (2013a: 145). Precisely this universal, global scope of topics, relevant for different societies and individuals, accounts for the great potential of films, and especially eco-documentaries, from a transcultural point of view. Yet, films like Before the Flood or A Life on Our Planet would presumably not fall into the film category deemed culturally relevant by Viebrock, as they do not deal with a specific region or one particular historical event. This, once more, points to the important question of the relationship between form and function or context in film analysis. If the cultural dimension of film were factored out, dealing with film in the language classroom becomes a rather lifeless endeavour, focusing only on the technical analysis of form without function and context. Other scholars therefore disagree with the idea that cultural studies need not be a necessary part of film literacy. Henseler, Möller and Surkamp, for instance, think of films as cultural artefacts in which Ricardo Römhild 124 culture - understood as the generated complex of ideas, forms of thinking, modes of sensibilities and values - materialises. Films can be regarded as means of cultural expression because they address matters of life via content and form. (Henseler, Möller & Surkamp 2011: 10; author’s translation) In this understanding, culture is always an integral part of film and, consequently, cultural learning should always be regarded as an integral part of film literacy. Hallet (2016: 180) specifies that films can only be adequately understood if one acknowledges their relation and corresponding reference to cultural discourses. In summary, this notion incorporates viewer response theory, distinguishes between a holistic perception of film and film analysis, and emphasises the importance of aesthetic and critical competences, although a definition of the latter remains rather vague. There are, however, elements of this concept which still need to be regarded critically. For a start, the concept revolves around the tripartition of attitudes, skills, and knowledge, which proves to be problematic, for example, with regards to the classification and definition of multimodality or multimodal competences as part of the knowledge domain. Furthermore, the distinction of BICS and CALP is worth reconsidering, in light of a discussion on complex literacies and the design of a learning progression geared towards the development of discourse competence at different levels of discourse (novice - expert). Connected to this aspect, the very definition of film literacy needs to be examined in terms of the relationship between film reception and language production. Finally, the role of cultural learning and contextualisation when dealing with film in the classroom needs further clarification, especially in light of alternative conceptualisations, such as the one suggested by Blell et al. (2016b). 3.4. Further contributions to film didactics in ELE Each of the three concepts introduced thus far incorporate and build upon other existing contributions to film didactics. Blell and Lütge (2008) fashioned their notion of Filmbildung as a comprehensive approach to film didactics on the basis of a number of already existing articles, such as Blell and Lütge 2004, Heinecke 2007, and Thaler 2007, to name but a few. Blell et al. (2016b) and Viebrock (2016) represent similar endeavours, but with the goal of outlining the discourse on film didactics as of the mid-2010s. What follows is an overview of other impactful contributions to teaching and learning with film in language education, so as to identify both the challenges and potentials associated with them for the contouring of film literacies. This overview is not exclusive, but it seeks to provide some background information on the motivations that led to the publication of the three concepts discussed above. While this overview is primarily organised Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 125 chronologically, it also clusters contributions according to their significance for special areas of film didactics. As such, the first group of scholars represents rather general approaches that outline key aspects of film literacies (Surkamp 2004a; Leitzke-Ungerer 2009; Henseler, Möller & Surkamp 2011; Lütge 2012), while the second group is associated with a special understanding of the medium in the context of a multiliteracies approach to teaching film (Elsner & Viebrock 2013; Hallet 2016). The third set of contributions presented here examine the role of cultural learning with film (Surkamp, e.g., 2004b, 2008; Lütge 2013a; König 2016) 6 . Further contributions to general film didactics For the ELE context, Surkamp’s seminal article Teaching Films (2004a) can be regarded as one of the earliest calls for taking films seriously as literary texts in their own rights. While Surkamp offers important remarks on the necessity of film analysis and the text form’s similarities with other literary forms, the most crucial element is in the subtitle of this piece: Surkamp outlines actionand process-oriented forms of dealing with film in the classroom, thus connecting aesthetic and content analysis to methodological approaches (she applies the pre-/ while-/ post-techniques (2004a: 6-7)) and to meaningful communication. Leitzke-Ungerer (2009) bases her understanding of film literacy on both receptive and productive aspects, underlining the importance of integrating subject-oriented approaches (Filmerleben) and cognitive-analytical approaches (film analysis). In terms of reception, she argues that the element of fascination as well as emotions are key to the development of those competences comprised in the notion of film literacy (2009: 17). In terms of reception, this includes the ability to understand auditive, visual, and audio-visual modes of meaning-making. Leitzke-Ungerer also contemplates the significance of written or textual modes but does not come to a conclusive answer, only assigning a marginal role to the understanding of written text when dealing with films (2009: 14). However, she suggests that reading abilities can be fostered in the context of teaching films by involving additional texts (paratexts) into the learning process (2009: 14). Leitzke- Ungerer also mentions intercultural competence as a key component of film literacy, arguing that films are “authentic products of the target culture and make possible the encounter with another lifeworld and its people, with different lifestyles, norms and values” (2009: 15). The author goes one step further, though, and involves transcultural learning in the sense of Hallet (2002: 47), that is, as a means towards the development of an 6 Within the limits of this contribution, it is not possible to address a fourth group, which put forth suggestions directly geared towards documentary film didactics and which deserve being mentioned separately (Bredella 1994; Volkmann 2007; Grimm 2009, 2015; Küchler 2009; Surkamp & Ziehte 2010; Kammerer & Kepser 2014; Henseler, Möller & Surkamp 2021; Römhild 2023, fc.). Ricardo Römhild 126 ability to participate in transcultural, global discourses. Transcultural learning, however, seems to be limited to certain films and topic areas only: The example provided in the text is climate change with a reference to An Inconvenient Truth (the article referenced here is Küchler 2009) (Leitzke- Ungerer 2009: 15). Partly motivated by the observation that the focus on film analysis has led to too narrow an understanding of film literacy (see Abraham 2009: 64), Henseler, Möller and Surkamp (2011) offer in their book a general introduction to film didactics, which is geared towards the use of film in teaching practice but which also identifies the theoretical cornerstones of a broader, more comprehensive notion of film literacy. Based on the work of Blell and Lütge (2004: 404), the authors define film literacy as perception competence, film aesthetic and film critical competences, intercultural competence (as in Byram’s ICC (1997)), cultural competence 7 (i.e., an approach to film analysis informed by cultural studies), and the ability to act and communicate in the foreign language. This notion displays a strong focus on using the language to talk about film, which needs to be preceded by (critical) film reception. As to the understanding of the medium as part of the meaning-making process, film is considered to be an audio-visual text first and foremost. As such, many competence targets revolve around the (critical) reception of audio-visual input. Lütge’s (2012) approach to film literacy showcases the evolution of this concept, and it can be regarded as an advancement of the ideas developed in cooperation with Blell (Blell & Lütge 2008) and, as such, also as an earlier or intermediate stage of film literacy, as suggested by Blell et al. (2016b). Essentially, Lütge’s notion of film literacy is based on her earlier work with Blell (Blell & Lütge 2004: 404) and comprises the same competence areas introduced in the context of Henseler, Möller and Surkamp’s (2011) book above, that is, perception competence, film aesthetic and film critical competences, intercultural competence, and the ability to act and communicate in the foreign language. Distinguishing this approach from others at the time, Lütge (2012: 123-127) takes into consideration the role of the Internet in the context of a more comprehensive concept of film literacy. While her deliberations largely remain on a level of practical usage and accessibility of films, rather than initiating discussion on a theoretical level, this can nonetheless be regarded as a first move towards the acknowledgement of digitalisation and its impact on the medium film itself and on teaching and learning with film. 7 Note the absence of this competence area in Lütge’s (2012; see below) concept, who uses the same basis in her book. The added competence area of cultural learning, as presented here, is a distinguishing feature of Henseler, Möller and Surkamp’s concept. Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 127 Multiliteracies-informed approaches to film didactics Throughout the presentation of the various film literacy concepts, multiliteracies pedagogy (The New London Group 1996; see also Kalantzis et al. 2016) has been mentioned several times as a potentially fruitful, theoretical framework for the use of films in the language classroom (and beyond). Elsner, Helff and Viebrock (2013: 8) define a multiliteracies approach to language education as aiming at “the development of functional, visual, multimodal, and digital literacies, transcultural competence, language awareness and critical-reflective thinking skills.” While some of the authors discussed thus far have hinted at the possible suitability of this construct for teaching film, 8 there are two contributions in particular that have developed this idea further. Starting with an examination of general objectives of language education in the 21 st century, Elsner and Viebrock (2013) arrive at the conclusion that the superordinate goal of discourse competence can only be achieved if language education considers the changing discourse practices to be characteristic of the 21st century. Among other things, the authors refer to the changing roles of web users from consumers to producers and to the increasingly multimodal nature of texts and meaning-making, in order to corroborate their argument. According to their theoretical deliberations, they suggest that “[a] multiliterate person has ideally developed functional, multimodal, visual and digital literacies, is able to critically reflect about and evaluate texts, and displays multilingual and transcultural awareness” (Elsner & Viebrock 2013: 28). They emphasise that these literacies are all closely intertwined. This approach to opening the film didactics discourse to the ideas of multiliteracies pedagogy is characterised by a strong focus on social implications carried by the literacies concept, which becomes apparent when considering the authors’ point of departure, discourse competence and the need to prepare students to participate in global discourses. The second contribution that explores the effectiveness of multiliteracies pedagogy for film didactics takes a slightly different trajectory. Hallet (2016) argues primarily from the perspective of the texts in question. According to him, film is a “virtually classic case of multimodality” (2016: 185; author’s translation). Based on this observation as well as his critical discussion on the notion of competence propagated in the German guide- 8 Especially Blell and Lütge (2008: 127) seem to come close to an understanding of literacy as is characteristic for multiliteracies pedagogy but dismiss it in this particular instance in favour of their notion of Filmbildung. Later in that same article, however, they return to multiliteracies, in the context of a cultural studies approach to teaching film (2008: 133). Likewise, the model proposed by Viebrock (2016) pays attention to multiliteracies pedagogy but does not quite follow through, as is argued in section 3.3. Ricardo Römhild 128 line documents, which, in his view, is characterised by too narrow a definition along the lines of film-related or rather audio-visual skills, Hallet conceptualises film reception as a multimodal and multiliteral act (2016: 186; see here especially Figure 1). The author also considers the different literacies that need to be developed by students, outlining his notion of film literacy as an integration of various literacies (2016: 190). As illustrated in Figure 4, these literacies include narrative literacy, sound literacy, visual and photographic literacy, dramatic literacy, musical literacy, communicative-discursive literacy, contextual literacy, film (discourse) knowledge and film anthropology, as well as cineastic literacy, the last of which seems to connect all other literacy areas together. While Elsner and Viebrock’s (2013) approach is inherently marked by a strong focus on the productive aspects associated with literacies development, Hallet’s (2016) notion seems to primarily concentrate on film reception. Although he does hint at the importance of communication and discourse participation (especially 2016: 190-191), it is particularly insightful, however, to look at the context of Hallet’s article to corroborate this claim. The text is part of Blell et al.’s (2016a) comprehensive concept of film literacy, which distinguishes between the competence fields “analysing film, designing film, contextualising film, and film-related communication” (Blell et al. 2016b: 22). Although one point of criticism in the previous discussion of Blell et al.’s concept aimed at the somewhat implied (albeit explicitly not desired) separation of these four competence fields, the decision to feature Hallet’s article next to only one other text (that is, Kammerer 2016, which addresses genre-related questions) in the area of “analysing film” rather confirms the suspicion that film literacy, in this context, is instead thought of in terms of film reception. Multiliteracies, in this instance, becomes a mode or means of analysis. With that in mind, Hallet’s film literacy model is too limited in scope to be considered a comprehensive model if compared to Blell et al. (2016), for instance, of which it may be regarded a component. Lütge (2012) argued in a similar vein, highlighting the importance of contextualisation and critical reflection. She noted that it is necessary to pay attention to how films represent cultural aspects, in order to avoid naïve, uncritical reception and, perhaps, the acceptance of stereotyping representations. To that end, she proposed three steps for intercultural learning with films: “culture-sensitive perception: visions and sounds of otherness,” “evaluating cultural images,” and “imag(in)ing alternatives” (Lütge 2012: 119). At the heart of this three-step approach is the aim to identify cinematic strategies of representation - in other words, perhaps, manipulation strategies -, which play or engage with culture-specific elements in one way or the other. As such, Lütge’s approach aims at a critical engagement with filmic representations of culture. Notably, both wording and content of this contribution suggest a strong reliance on a concept of culture akin to what forms the basis of Byram’s (1997; 2021) ICC model. Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 129 Fig. 4. Film literacy as an integration of literacies in the act of reception (translation of Hallet 2016: 190; author’s translation). In conceivably stark contrast to her earlier publication, Lütge no longer employed intercultural jargon in her 2013(a) contribution on Global (Audio)Visions, but instead she bases her argumentation on Cates’ (2004: 241) definition of global education and Pennycook’s (2007) views on culture: Lütge (2013a: 143) speaks of a “world of wide-ranging and ongoing cultural ‘borrowing, bending and blending’ (Pennycook 2007: 36-37, 47),” as well as Baumann’s (2000) concept of “liquid modernity,” to describe a notion of culture which is much more hybrid, fluid, and dynamic than previously suggested. Films are being described as “global interfaces,” which bear great potential for cultural learning, “transgressing culture boundaries and conflicts and turning into a collective learning experience” (Lütge 2013a: 145). One of the examples used in her line of argumentation is the eco-documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Lütge (2013a: 146) notes, “[the] very format of a documentary film may trigger critical discussions with a view to its international reception, the constructedness of its morally appealing images and a general claim for its universal righteousness, one of the big conceptual challenges about teaching global issues.” Crucially, Lütge (2013a: 149) established a close connection between cultural studies, film literacy, and global education, suggesting a three-part methodology for engaging with films, particularly environmental films. These steps can be read as a development of those presented in her 2012 publication, Ricardo Römhild 130 with a more open, hybrid, and dynamic understanding of culture shining through: “watching out for representations of global issues,” “evaluating cultural images and global views,” and “developing a critical global (audiovisual) awareness” (Lütge 2013a: 149). Hinting at the research gap addressed in this study, she argues that [developing] “audio-visions” for globally challenging topics requires not so much a ‘recipe approach’ making use of pre-, while and post-viewing activities but a concept for fostering an awareness of the global scope of environmental and cultural sustainability, more broadly still to be developed in a conception of global education that takes into account critical and environmental literacies for the EFL classroom. (Lütge 2013a: 154) The tight link between cultural learning and film is also central to Blell and Surkamp’s (2016; see also Blell et al. 2016b) contribution to the design of a comprehensive model of film literacies in language education - particularly within the area of contextualising film. They point out that cultural and communicative action always need to be thought of as being in tandem when it comes to the design of task scenarios to assist learners in their development of cultural literacies (Blell & Surkamp 2016: 19). In this context, they refer to König’s (2016) definition of a broad, multi-dimensional concept of culture as the foundation for their argumentation. König (2016) differentiates between three interpretations of the concept of culture when it comes to learning with films (and beyond): textual, performative, and hybrid. The textual understanding of culture (see also Bachmann-Medick 2004) allows a sort of reading of culture and the identification as well as interpretation of cultural meaning construction in film (see also Lütge’s (2012, 2013a) notion of seeking, perceiving, and reflecting on representations of culture in films discussed above). A performative understanding of culture implies that critical-evaluative participation and active engagement with films lead to participation in the construction of cultural meanings (König 2016: 276; see also Hallet 2010). This highlights the significance of the learners and learner agency for cultural learning. A hybrid understanding of culture (based on, e.g., Bhabha & Rutherford 1990; Kramsch 1993; Bhabha 1994; Hallet 2002) entails the negotiation and, crucially, the toleration of difference and diversity. While both Blell and Surkamp’s (2016) and König’s (2016) argumentations represent steps towards the consistent consideration of cultures being hybrid and fluid, thereby overcoming outdated ICC-framings, there still seems to be the need for clarification with regards to the cultural dimension of teaching and learning with films. While both Surkamp and Lütge have clearly moved towards a hybrid understanding of cultures (see, e.g., Lütge 2013a/ b; Blell & Surkamp 2016), the intercultural heritage still seems to resonate in many publications on the relationship between cultural learning and film. For instance, elaborating on the potential of films Concepts of film literacies in (English) Language Education 131 for cultural learning, Alter (2016: 140) highlights the fact that films can be used to increase learner’s cultural knowledge (see also Zibelius 2016, who, in the same volume, expands on the use of films for the teaching of ICC). While Alter makes an important and generally accepted point here, it remains questionable if the acquisition of orientational knowledge suffices when it comes to teaching and learning for sustainability with eco-documentaries. However, as a closer look at the different approaches to film didactics discussed thus far reveals, not only is the underlying conceptualization of culture being contested in the current discourse on film literacy but so is the significance attributed to cultural learning in the context of films in the first place. Just considering the contributions by Blell and Lütge (2008), Blell et al. (2016b), Viebrock (2016), and Hallet (2016), cultural learning assumes a variety of different roles. Blell and Lütge (2008) include it as the pinnacle of film literacy, while Blell et al. (2016b) and Hallet (2016) see it as an integral part of contextualization. Viebrock (2016), on the other hand, brackets cultural studies in her design. 4. Outlook and desiderata In summary, this overview displays a rather clear focus on the processes of film reception and critical film analysis (see, e.g., Thaler 2014; Hallet 2016; Viebrock 2016), which has been refuted in some concepts, favouring a balance between reception and production as well as context-oriented analysis (Blell & Lütge 2008; Lütge 2012; Blell et al. 2016b). Closely connected to the primacy of the reception process and film analysis in some concepts is the suppression of affective elements and aspects of fascination, which are included in more recent publications but have been deemed to be unrealistic in other contributions, at least in part (Viebrock 2016). There are, however, contributions that favour the integration of subjectand objectoriented approaches, as called for by Decke-Cornill and Luca (2007) (Blell & Lütge 2008; Blell et al. 2016b). In addition, it is possible to observe a shift towards action and product orientation with a stronger focus on active communicative agency as primary objectives of film-based learning. The role and significance of cultural learning seem to be contested, though the majority of approaches include it as a crucial element of film contextualisation. Furthermore, a few publications open the discourse for multiliteracies-informed approaches, which bears highly promising implications for a contemporary conceptualisation of films in ELE. Based on these observations, it is possible to identify a number of desiderata and possible trajectories of future research in the field. For instance, there is a need for further contouring of cultural learning and cultural literacies in the context of film-based education, particularly in light of increasing interest in the role of (film-based) language education for Ricardo Römhild 132 citizenship education (see e.g., Nash 2014; Römhild 2022) and a general shift towards global citizenship education (e.g., Lütge, Merse & Rauschert 2022). In this context, the ideas of learner agency (as active change agents in an interconnected world) and product orientation in film-based language education are worth exploring in more detail in future research. This relates to the notion of multimodality and, closely connected to this, experiencing film as key aspects in film-based, student-centered language education, which also need to be conceptualized and investigated more. Finally, considering the idea of films as designs, which are defined by the complex processes of production, distribution, and reception, it is also worthwhile to pay attention to the changing forms of film distribution, e.g., via streaming platforms, which might have considerable influence on how learners engage with (horizontal, vertical) storytelling. 5. References Abraham, Ulf (2009). Filme im Deutschunterricht. Seelze: Kallmeyer. Abraham, Ulf ([2009] 2012). Filme im Deutschunterricht. Seelze: Kallmeyer. Alter, Grit (2016): “I am the captain of my soul” - Invictus in the EFL classroom. In: Britta Viebrock (Ed.). Feature Films in English Language Teaching. Tübingen: Narr. 129-142. Baacke, Dieter (1997). Medienpädagogik. Tübingen: De Gruyter. Bachmann-Medick, Doris (Ed.). ([1996] 2004). Kultur als Text. Die anthropologische Wende in der Literaturwissenschaft. Tübingen: A. Francke. Bachmann-Medick, Doris (Ed.). (2007). Cultural Turns. Neuorientierung in den Kulturwissenschaften. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. & Jonathan Rutherford (1990). The third space. Interview with Homi Bhabha. In: Jonathan Rutherford (Ed.). Identity. Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 207-221. Blell, Gabriele & Sabine Doff (2014). It takes more than two for this tango: Moving beyond the self/ other-binary in teaching about culture in the global EFL-classroom. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 19 (1): 77-96. Blell, Gabriele, Andreas Grünewald, Matthis Kepser & Carola Surkamp (Eds.). (2016a). Film in den Fächern der sprachlichen Bildung. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag. Blell, Gabriele, Andreas Grünewald, Matthis Kepser & Carola Surkamp (2016b). Film in den Fächern Deutsch, Englisch, Französisch, Spanisch. Ein Modell zur sprach- und kulturübergreifenden Filmbildung. 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Die Vermittlung von Fernsehkompetenz im Englischunterricht. In: Wolfgang Hallet & Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Neue Ansätze und Konzepte der Literatur- und Kulturdidaktik. Trier: WVT-Verlag. 351-370. Zibelius, Marja (2016). Developing “intercultural communicative competence” with Ae Fond Kiss. In: Britta Viebrock (Ed.). Feature Films in English Language Teaching. Tübingen: Narr. 217-232. Zydatiß, Wolfgang (2008). SMS an KMK: Standards mit Substanz! Kulturelle Inhalte, Mediation zwischen Sprachsystem und Sprachhandeln, Kritikfähigkeit - auch im Fremdsprachenunterricht. In: Heinz H. Lüger & Andrea Rössler (Eds.). Wozu Bildungsstandards? Zwischen Input- und Outputorientierung in der Fremdsprachenvermittlung. Landau: Verlag Empirische Pädagogik. 13-34. Ricardo Römhild University of Münster Benjamin Franklin and Gottfried Achenwall, Amerika 1766. Anmerkungen über Nordamerika, und über dasige Großbritannische Colonien. Published and commented by Heinrich Detering and Lisa Kunze. Wallstein, 2023. Julia Sattler Almost 250 years after it took place, the American Revolution still bears fascination for Americans and non-Americans alike. Obviously, the events that led to the American colonists’ desire for freedom from Great Britain’s governance, and the development of a decidedly own, distinguishable ‘American’ identity in the years and decades following the “Declaration of Independence” are captivating subjects of study. But they also bring to the forefront noteworthy voices from what was to become the United States. Benjamin Franklin is certainly among those fascinating figures - a Founding Father, but also so much more. Coming from a modest background, Franklin was almost entirely selfeducated, but yet would become an important scientist, inventor, writer and publisher, founder of several organizations and institutions, including the American postal services and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an internationally known statesman and diplomat. Heinrich Detering’s and Lisa Kunze’s volume, published in August of 2022, takes the reader back to Franklin and his time. In its extensive 60-page long introduction, it discusses a German-American encounter that led to the publication of an important transatlantic document, first in Hannoverisches Magazin (1767), and, later on, in book-form. This comprehensive work, Benjamin Franklin’s and Gottfried Achenwall’s Anmerkungen über Nordamerika, und über dasige Großbritannische Colonien, sheds a light on the political and social climate in the American colonies immediately preceding the Revolution. It is also an important text for the comprehension of the transatlantic exchange of ideas on political and social issues in the second half of the 18 th century. The book adds to our understanding of German and European knowledge and imagination of the American colonies with regard to their economic structures, the social and legal systems, as well as the political relations between the colonies and Great Britain. In order to appreciate Franklin’s and Achenbach’s work adequately, the rich cultural, social and historical context this publication provides for the Anmerkungen über Nordamerika, und über dasige Großbritannische Colonien is AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2024-0006 Reviews 140 extremely helpful even for readers who are already fairly familiar with American Enlightenment thought. The introduction provides detailed knowledge about the foreground of the American Revolution, and the mindset and reasoning behind it. Moreover, the role of transatlantic political exchange is an oftenunderestimated subject in relation to the American Revolution. As the introduction explains, to keep the colonies firmly under control, the Crown established the Sugar Act (1764), the Quarter Act (1765) and the Stamp Act (1765). These regulations led to an atmosphere of conflict across the Atlantic. At this time, the onset of the first major conflicts between the British Crown and the thirteen colonies, Benjamin Franklin made himself a name as a powerful spokesperson for a principle that is today known as “no taxation without representation.” His hearing in the House of Commons in February 1766, in which he advocated against the Stamp Act, stating that it would lead to “a total loss of the respect and affection the people of America bear to this country” (11), did not only gain him respect and visibility in the colonies, but also in England. It also became known in the Electorate of Hannover, at the time of course still closely interlinked with Great Britain itself. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean several times in his life, Franklin - at the time known around the world for his invention of the lightning rod - came to the German city of Göttingen together with his companion Sir John Pringle, the personal doctor of the Royal Family. His arrival occurred almost exactly one decade before the events of the American Revolution would give birth to a new nation that would eventually become a global power. This visit was preceded by a curative visit to the Pyrmont spa and a trip to Hannover, where Franklin met, among others, Gerlach Adolph von Münch-hausen, founder and curator of the University of Göttingen, who extended an invitation to his university. Göttingen at the time was rather different from its rural surroundings. The university, in its brief 30 years of existence, had already gained fame and at that time brought important researchers, from the German-speaking world as well as from abroad, to the area. The atmosphere was hence open as well as filled with the spirit of discovery. Still, it was rather unusual at that time that a well-known scholar from the American colonies paid a visit, and Franklin’s presence was echoed widely in the press. The local intellectuals were very interested in the developments in the American colonies, and it was here that Franklin met another exceptional personality of this time, albeit on the German side. Gottfried Achenwall, like Franklin, was a champion of interdisciplinarity and eclecticism - he taught history and the law but is also one of the fathers of modern-day statistics. Following Franklin’s departure, he would keep in touch with the man from across the Atlantic Ocean, finally resulting in the series of papers that are here republished. The discussions that were held with Franklin in the spirit of the Enlightenment about the future role of universities, but also about the colonies’ immense population growth and its consequences for the economy are extremely insightful as are the accompanying documents in the annex. The original work was put together by Achenwall, supposedly based on the oral exchange between the former and Franklin, but was later authorized by Franklin, suggesting that Rezensionen 141 he was content with Achenwall’s report. Interestingly enough, the Anmerkungen foreshadow many of the later developments in the colonies and even in the United States, including open questions relating to the nature of the state and its role that accompanied the nation all the way up to the Civil War. The text already suggests that differences will prevail between different sections of the country after the independence from the Crown. What is here described as “jealousy” (102) by Franklin will erupt into a violent conflict less than a century later. In addition, the text makes clear that the colonists, already a decade before the Revolution, view themselves as subjects of the King, but not of Parliament, which is interesting in view of the developments to come: It hints at the future dispute about who has the authority to determine the status of the colonists, and who can decide upon the colony’s further development. The publication also addresses the situation of Native Americans and African American slaves. It offers the painful but valuable insight that at the time, the threat of disease to the indigenous population was well-recognized but not acted upon by the politically dominant white population. At the same time, Native Americans are said to have reached political goals that the colonists still have to attain, for example the organization of a federation. These ideas appear to be part of Franklin’s own ambivalence towards Native Americans which the introduction recognizes and discusses (42-43). That slaves are said to have all rights but freedom and property (75) also reflects a wide-spread attitude at the time. It should be noted that Franklin, in later years, developed a much more critical attitude towards the institution of slavery (45-46). While these are just a few examples of subjects addressed in the work, they already make clear that the Anmerkungen is a very valuable resource for the study of America before independence, but also to learn about the rhetoric of this time papering over ambivalences in politics and other areas. Overall, this timely and extremely well-researched publication - an early German present for the 250 th anniversary of the American Revolution - invites further study: of the original documents from that time, in part also re-printed in the book, but also of the intellectual climate of Enlightenment America and the imagination of the American colonies in Europe. A comparison with other - also later - portraits of America would certainly reveal further transatlantic insights. Indeed, one of the merits of this book is that it shows how crucial the Revolutionary period is to understanding the development of transatlantic relations until today. Julia Sattler TU Dortmund University Nada Šabec, Slovene Immigrants and their Descendants in North America: Faces of Identity. Maribor: University of Maribor Press, 2021. Walter Grünzweig In the mid-1970s, I studied at Ohio University in Athens, located in the nonindustrial, economically underdeveloped Appalachian region not much affected by European migration to the state’s northern industrial centers some 70 years earlier. A short time after my return to my native Austria, a friend of mine from Ohio visited me, and we took an extended trip to Yugoslavia, a country in which Americans took great interest at the time due to its strategic position at the global ideological divide and its important, though aging, leader Josip Broz Tito. As we traveled on trains, sat in cafés and hung out on beaches, much of it in Slovenia, some people, hearing our American English, addressed us, wondering whether we were from Ohio. After a while, the association became disturbing to Mike, and he wondered whether I thought something about his physique or his dress or anything else made him look like an Ohioan and whether Ohioans were somehow different from the rest of Americans. I have told this story many times as part of my travel lore, but it is particularly instructive when reviewing Nada Šabec’s magisterial study of Slovenian immigration to Anglophone North America. First, the conflation of the state with the country demonstrates the significance of (Northern) Ohio as a center of Balkan Slavic (and not only Slovenian! ) migration, which also explains why Šabec’s study focuses on the City of Cleveland. Incidentally, the author lived in Cleveland for extended periods of time as a researcher and based her first, more linguistically inclined book on her research there. Although her new book takes a larger perspective, including Slovenian migration to Canada, especially Vancouver, it is really a book about Cleveland, Ohio, similar to the way that studies on Polish migration to the US are often about Chicago. Secondly, my friend’s experiences of being perceived as an Ohioan shows Slovenians’ (and, again, other former Yugoslav peoples’) knowledge of, as well as interest in, their migrant communities. It is thus important that this remarkable book is written and published in English. On the one hand, of course, this is because it can be read by the many Slovenian-Americans of the second and third generations (and beyond) it deals with and who would often be unable to read an academic text written in Slo- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2024-0007 Rezensionen 144 venian. On the other hand, Nada Šabec’s study is also significant as an interesting case study for scholars and individuals working in the field of migration. Slovenian migration is unique for two specific reasons: Firstly, the proportion of this migration is extraordinarily large compared to that of other nations. Secondly, similar to other nations that were part of the Habsburg Empire, Slovenians did not migrate from their own separate and independent country. My favorite fact about Slovenians in the world is that, just prior to World War I, the three largest Slovenian cities were, in that order, Trieste, Ljubljana and Cleveland! The methodology and the contents of this investigation address the special situation of Slovenian migration to North America. Nada Šabec is a linguist by training, but like many linguists who work on foreign languages, she has a cultural studies’ bent. In the current study, the questions she asks thus go beyond linguistic features and address cultural as well as soci(ologic)al frameworks. The book’s key concept actually is identity, and rather than limiting her potential findings to a narrow definition of this term, she actually retains its semantic magnetism, which helps her include aspects of the Slovenian diaspora in Cleveland that she would otherwise have overlooked or which would have fallen through her grid. As a researcher who investigates “cultural narratives” (i.e. stories that cultures tell about themselves), I am not worried about the eclectic lists of “factors” Šabec uses to measure and/ or explain Slovenian ethnic identity. One example is the following list of six: „Slovene language, culture, religion, cuisine, work ethic, and other.” (61) This definitely is, at first sight, a very diverse and unsystematic catalogue. Obviously, language operates in each one (as long as Slovenian is still the medium of communication). Would “cuisine” not be at the very heart of “culture? ” Only ultra-orthodox believers will separate “religion” from “culture,” and many examples in the study show that “religion” is central to “cuisine” (given the many religiously inspired holidays that obviously use food as an important medium). Finally, “work ethic,” in a way the odd-man-out on this list, is a particularly curious item reflecting, I suspect, a Slovenian autostereotype vis-à-vis other Balkan nations (similarly to Germans with regard to the rest of Europe). Far from being systematic, this list is closely related to the largest and, to me, most important and interesting part of the book, namely the “Immigrant Narratives.” Some 120 pages, as Šabec touchingly says in her preface, “give a voice to the participants in the study themselves who, through narratives, relate their own personal experiences and views […].” (12) I disagree with the opposition she makes between the “subjective tone and authenticity” of the narratives and the “comparatively more objective data from the empirical research in the first part” (12), but this is irrelevant here. What she gives to Cultural Studies is so rich and plentiful that we should gladly accept it. While I thus evaluate this book from a cultural studies perspective, I certainly do appreciate its linguistic findings. The focus on bilingualism is Šabec’s starting point for her study of the Slovenian immigrant experience, and it is certainly fascinating to observe how the monolinguality of the fresh migrant mutates to various phases of bilingualism, only to end, in most cases, in a new, Reviews 145 English-only, monolingualism. As a former learner of Slovenian, I was particularly interested in the one feature that makes Slovenian, along with Sorbian, unique among European languages, and that is the Dual. I was disappointed with the results in regard to that morphological feature. In the data Šabec collected in North America, she apparently did not find any examples of it, thus apparently radicalizing a tendency where “the use of the dual is in the process of weakening in the Slovene as currently spoken in Slovenia.” (45) This is interesting because, in other areas of the language, including lexicology, conservative attitudes seem to prevail. One Slovenian-American, not a linguist, returning to her home country, finds that she is “bothered not only by foreign words, but also by the slang, especially among young people, e.g. why ‘frendica’ and ‘lajkati’ [from ‘friend’ and ‘like’] when the language has the adequate words […].” (141) However, Slovenian migrants to America also produce neologisms, albeit inadvertently at times. My favorite word in the book is the way “some of the participants in my study” pronounce Pennsylvania as “Penslovenija.” Šabec reports: “When I drew their attention to this, the participants claimed that they were not aware of the mispronunciation, but when presented with tape-recorded proof, speculated this may have to do with their association/ similar pronunciation of Slovenija.” (45) What a modest way of interpreting what seems to me a Freudian way of projecting their original homeland into their new one! Is the new country a prefix of the old - Penslovenia ? Or is, as in “Pennslovania,” the European ancestral land introjected into the new one similar to the successful Slovenian tourist campaign centering on “Slovenia” (“Slovenia is the only country with love in its name”). Altogether, however, it is impossible “to ignore the omnipresent pressure of English as a dominant language and, as a consequence, the increasing attrition of Slovene across the generations.” (50) This makes for “a very transitional and unstable bilingualism” and turns “language maintenance” into a burdensome process. (51) Slovenian has some 2.5 million speakers globally and questions of language ecology are, consequently, more pressing for them than for speakers of other, more prevalent languages. It is, therefore, particularly noticeable that Šabec takes a very open approach to the attrition of the Slovenian language. She acknowledges that “integration” is a natural part of the migrant experience, preferable to either assimilation or separation/ marginalization (see 19f.), and she therefore sees the Slovenian population “becoming a valuable part of the mainstream society while also preserving a degree of cultural identity.” (20) The ultimate question, then, given the inevitability of language “loss,” is whether and to what degree a Slovenian identity can be maintained? This problem is best formulated by a member of the second generation, Milan Vinčec, a music teacher in the Slovenian school in Toronto. He explains the development of his Slovenian identity in the context of getting to know the songs of his ethnic community: “My young ears heard the beautiful Slovenian language, as I pondered the meaning of the lyrics. My heart pounded as I danced to the beautiful rhythms of this unique music.” (231) At the end of the interview, it Rezensionen 146 becomes apparent that, while the language will disappear, the music will remain: I believe we are in the midst of a significant paradigm shift here in Canada. That is to say, Slovenian identity will be associated more with emotional attachment, and nostalgic longing, in regards to certain values and cultural traditions. Language will no longer be a consideration, because the Slovenian language will no longer be spoken. […] The question is whether knowing and speaking the language is essential to one’s cultural identity. Can people consider themselves to be truly Slovenian without speaking the language? (233) His own answer is hesitatingly positive: “I imagine the Slovenian culture will survive, one way or another. It will be considerably different than the one I knew.” (233) But his question reaches further, to the very center of the “ethnic debates” in both Canada and the United States. The Slovenian answers given in this volume are manifold and complex, and they deserve to be heard. The stories told here are full of musical instruments and music (tamburitzas, accordion and polka), cooking and food (klobase, sauerkraut and Jota bean soup and potica) as well as religious traditions, none of which are truly exclusively Slovenian. In fact, more than once do we observe how “ethnics” band together to express themselves in what they consider to be “theirs.” But these stories are not informed by a nationalist essentialism. The practice of Slovenian ethnicity in North America is here often expressed in psychological terms or as a starting point of or incentive for creativity. Sometimes, folk costumes and cuisine can “re-charge [the] batteries” (169) or a Slovenian book can be “a balm for the soul.” (72) For one interviewee, becoming a specialist in Japanese language and culture is indirectly connected to her Slovenian heritage - i.e., ethnicity as a motor for international awareness and a global outlook. On many occasions, the storytellers explain how being Slovenian made them special. Obviously, “being ethnic” assumes a significant value in the age of the standardizing effects of mass media. Whether the Slovenian case may indeed be somewhat special, as I am inclined to believe, this book is definitely a contribution to the debate. And whether “Sloveneness” (53) or “Slovenia-ness” (149), the “Faces of Identity” presented in this attractive book, with a cover painting by Maribor artist and professor of painting Anka Krašna entitled “Across the Ocean,” in which the fish seem to swim in two directions, are as diverse as the questions they raise. Walter Grünzweig TU Dortmund University BUCHTIPP Auf der Grundlage aktueller Forschungs- und Lehrprojekte zeigt dieser Sammelband systematisch Bezugspunkte zwischen Sprachwissenschaft, Fachdidaktik und schulischem Englischunterricht auf und leistet damit einen Beitrag zur Weiterentwicklung der gegenwärtigen Debatte um Kohärenz und Professionalisierung in der Fremdsprachenlehrkräftebildung. Die Beiträge, die den Schwerpunktbereichen Englisch als Sprachsystem, Englisch als Weltsprache, Englisch als Sprache von Lernenden und Lehrenden sowie Englische Korpuslinguistik und Fachdidaktik zugeordnet sind, erörtern, welche linguistischen Inhalte, Methoden und Werkzeuge für den Englischunterricht besonders relevant sind und wie diese für die Professionalisierung von (angehenden) Lehrkräften nutzbar gemacht werden können. Damit dient der Band als Ideensammlung und Handreichung für alle Akteur: innen im Bereich der Fremdsprachenlehrkräftebildung. Anna Rosen, Katharina Beuter (Hrsg.) Englische Sprachwissenschaft und Fachdidaktik im Dialog Chancen zur Stärkung der Lehrkräftebildung Giessener Beiträge zur Fremdsprachendidaktik 1. Auflage 2024, 225 Seiten €[D] 64,00 ISBN 978-3-381-11251-7 eISBN 978-3-381-11252-4 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de narr.digital ISBN 978-3-381-12361-2 ISSN 0171 - 5410 Contributions by: Elen Le Foll Günther Sigott, Samuel Hafner, Hermann Cesnik, Theresa Weiler, Kristina Leitner and Eva Dousset-Ortner Reinhard Heuberger Alenka Vrbinc, Donna M. Farina and Marjeta Vrbinc Ricardo Römhild Julia Sattler Walter Grünzweig