This course will be
devoted to working with corpora collected by Pfaff in a series of research
projects carried out in Berlin from 1978 – 2013. The studies focus on the
German second language and also the development of the mother tongues /
heritage languages and English foreign language of children and adolescents.
Data come from four cross-sectional studies of participants growing up with
varying degrees of contact with native German peers in their neighborhoods and
classrooms and a longitudinal study in a Turkish/German bilingual day care
center / preschool which followed the children into the early primary school
years. After a brief overview of the studies, their methodologies and selected
findings, we will focus on hands-on work with transcripts of audio files, for
the older participants, written texts in German and their first, second or
foreign languages.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Carol Pfaff