Die sogenannte geschlechtergerechte Sprache in Lehr- und Lernpraxis – ein Fall für den Zweitspracherwerb im Kontext von Prüfen, Testen und Evaluieren?

Abstract

In recent years, gendered language has developed into an element of discourse. At universities and in the public sphere, there is an ongoing search for so-called gender-equitable formulation constants, which present enormous grammatical difficulties in terms of performance. The aim of this article is to highlight problem areas in the use of gendered language in general and in teaching and learning materials in particular and to identify the resulting difficulties in teaching GFL learners in foreign language lessons. The grammatical-semantic mechanisms of our language system clearly demonstrate that gendering has considerable irregularities and thus poses problems that make language acquisition more difficult. Thus, language system-related facts speak against the integration of gendering into the language learning process. At the beginning of the article, two terms that are fundamental to the topic are explained. These are gender-inclusive language and the generic masculine. This is followed by an evaluation of the materials examined, which are GFL textbooks that are relevant for testing and assessment. To be more precise, personal designations were scrutinized to see to what extent gendered and ungendered forms occur in them. Overall, it can be seen that the teaching materials make little use of gendered language. References to persons were analyzed within the exercises and not primarily in tasks. This section is followed by an analysis of problem areas of gendered language related to the language system. Finally, conclusions are drawn from this analysis for future study material in GFL lessons.

Keywords

• gendered language in teaching and learning materials
• foreign language teaching
• daf