CRC 1412/1: Register Knowledge in Advanced Learner Language (SP C04)

The project will investigate how learners of a foreign language acquire register competence by analysing spoken and written corpus data produced by advanced learners of German as a foreign language and native speaker control groups. Two hypotheses will be tested: (i) Even advanced learners do not distinguish between registers in the same way that native speakers do, and (ii) even advanced learners do not distinguish between registers as much as native speakers do. Native speakers and learners will first be compared within the same register and then across registers. In the first phase, two different types of register will be studied: written argumentative essays on the one hand and spoken map task dialogues on the other.