This article reviews a purposive sample of 16 doctoral dissertations in second language (L2) education, completed between 2014 and 2018 and published in German, in Germany. Among the 103 relevant dissertations found from this period, a total of 12 thematic strands were identified, of which five were chosen as being particularly common and thus…

In comparison with younger children, older students tend to be less motivated to read. A literature class that fails to motivate students is one aspect that has often been discussed in this regard. Using data from 405 German ninth graders, we examined how students' book reading is related to intrinsic situational and intrinsic habitual reading…

Imparting 'literary competence' (understood here as a combination of skills involved in engaging with 'texts' of various kinds, among them film) has always been a core concern within German critical pedagogy. This article presents 11 aspects of literary learning, covering subjective involvement and the development of a text within the imagination;…

My argument is that a literary education should build on a primary level of responsivity towards literature, involving empathy and immersion in the world of the text. To engage with literary works from the past involves a play between familiarity and strangeness, and this play should be located as part of a reader's response to texts, rather than…

This article analyses the teaching of Swedish language lecturers active in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. It shows the centrality of literature and literary constructions and analyses images of Swedishness and the Swedish nation present in the teaching material of that time in relation to the national image present in…

Using the 2000 and 2009 waves of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, we examined the relationships between family socio-economic status (SES), cultural capital, and reading achievement among students in five post-socialist Eastern European countries while comparing the findings with three Western bench-marking countries.…

Taking the establishment of structured doctoral programmes in Germany as an example, this paper focuses on how knowledge production in certain academic fields reshapes their doctoral education in a widely changing policy context. Based on case studies of eight graduate schools in three research fields, namely economics, life sciences, and…

This article is based on the teaching experiment implemented in summer 2013 in a modern Finnish literature course organised by the Centre for International Mobility (CIMO) and the University of Jyväskylä Language Centre. In order to break away from the traditional conception of literature and text, students' independent blogging was chosen as the…

Identity fusion is a relatively unexplored form of alignment with groups that entails a visceral feeling of oneness with the group. This feeling is associated with unusually porous, highly permeable borders between the personal and social self. These porous borders encourage people to channel their personal agency into group behavior, raising the…

Arthur Sutherland Neill is one of the most debated personalities among the representatives of the classic reform pedagogy, due to his pedagogical concept and its practical realization, and his Summerhill School, equally. He is often mentioned during public debates, where mostly the "three S"--"sex, swearing and smoking", are…

At a time when the power of schools and both state and federal education authorities to guide young people's sense of belonging is being challenged by multilingualism, by the claims of supra- and subnational regions and minorities, by memories of national catastrophes and crimes, and by out-of-school educational media, this collection of essays…

The purpose of this paper is to observe the approaches used by educators to facilitate learning about the Holocaust. The examples provided in this paper are one of various approaches that are used by educators teaching in the Federal Republic of Germany. Approaches will be different from country to country, from school to school, and from educator…

Suggests approaches to a holocaust course based on imaginative literature. The course outlined would be aimed at college students who do not speak German. (EJS)

This paper explains how cultural life in Germany is shared through public funding and support. Since culture is commonly accepted by Germans to be vital to the psychic health of the nation, public funding of culture is not a controversial issue. The expression "cultural federalism" is frequently used to describe the way in which…

Curricula for interdisciplinary courses that enable second language classes to employ the arts are proposed. At the University of North Dakota, mini-courses provide one-semester credit and are given for 2 hours 1 day a week over a period of 8 weeks. Some of the courses are cross-listed with other departments. Two of these courses, Joan of Arc and…