Human Science Pedagogy is 'a strange case,' as Jürgen Oelkers has recently noted: In the Anglophone world, where Gert Biesta has compellingly encouraged scholars to 'reconsider education as a Geisteswissenschaft' (a human science) its main themes and the contributions of its central figures remain unknown. For Germans, particularly in more…

In this article, I focus on a group of people whose voices in archival materials are especially hard, or very unusual, to find. This group comprises intellectually "abnormal" children. Using the example of German-speaking Switzerland and focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I will show the types of materials produced on…

German fairy tales have an established history of appropriation in popular media, from oral traditions to mobile media. The mimetic quality of fairy-tale motifs and tropes provides ideal conditions for intertextual adaptation. In this article, I demonstrate that German fairy-tale themed music videos are powerful vehicles for culture, parody, and…

In this essay, which is a response to five papers on Heidegger and education but can also be read independently, I argue that it is only when we introduce the German distinction between "Bildung" and "Erziehung" that it becomes possible to discuss in sufficient detail the possibilities and limitations of a Heideggerian account…

Bilinguals who consider moral problems in their foreign language tend to endorse causing harm to others if that leads to good outcomes more than they do in their native language. Cavar and Tytus [2018. "Moral Judgement and Foreign Language Effect: When the Foreign Language Becomes the Second Language. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural…

In Austria, segregated German language support classes (GLSC) were introduced in the school year 2018/19 to intensively support students who had previously little or no contact with German, the official language of instruction. These classes have been widely criticised; however, a formal evaluation of their effects has yet to be published. In…

In the ten years since the Modern Language Association published their report, "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" (2007) dissatisfaction with the "two-tiered configuration" of US foreign language departments has become increasingly vocal. While the target of the criticism is often the…

This article argues that instructors can effectively implement visual and multi-modal methods often used in beginner and intermediate courses as effective building blocks to develop skills of literary analysis. The article presents aspects of a mini-curriculum based on "Die Verwandlung," the graphic novel, and examples of student work…

This article offers commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in this issue. It argues that more precise definitions are needed for the terms "rule," "simple," and "productive." Topics discussed include Amaral and Roeper's verb second (V2) rule,…

Has the "Strategy Inventory for Language Learning" (SILL) passed its expiry date? The SILL (Oxford, 1990) was designed as a self-evaluation tool to measure the frequency of language learning strategies used by foreign and second language (L2) learners. With simple mathematics, learners can analyze their strategy preferences overall and…

This article clarifies some ideas presented in this issue's keynote article (Amaral and Roeper, this issue) and discusses several issues raised by the contributors' comments on the nature of the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory. One of the key goals of the article is to unequivocally state that MG is not a parametric theory and that its…

The paper outlines the reception of Schwab's essay "The practical: A language for curriculum" in German-speaking countries in the 1970s and 1980s. The story is a good demonstration of the ways in which different circumstances and phases of development determine transatlantic exchanges and the influence of concepts in the field of…

The increased use of electronic glosses to help students with reading in a foreign language has led to numerous studies of their effectiveness with elementary or intermediate students. However, advanced students in literature classes also need help, not only with literary interpretations, but with the kinds of language problems that glossing can…

Previous research has shown that in different languages ironic speech is acoustically modulated compared to literal speech, and these modulations are assumed to aid the listener in the comprehension process by acting as cues that mark utterances as ironic. The present study was conducted to identify paraverbal features of German "ironic…

The task of teaching non-territorial languages such as Yiddish at the university level is a complex undertaking. The teaching of Yiddish has its own particular difficulties due to an ever-diminishing population of native speakers available to students, a lack of contemporary cultural materials, and an abundance of outdated teaching materials. A…