Kontrastivität als Strategie zur effektiven Wortschatzerweiterung im DaF-Unterricht: Eine Fallstudie über deutsche ver-Verben und ihre Entsprechungen im Schwedischen

Abstract

The present work investigates whether and how contrastive analysis as a learning and teaching strategy can make vocabulary learning in German as a foreign language (GAFL) classes in Sweden more effective. Contrastive linguistics serves as a theoretical basis for the investigation. The material used for the case study includes German verbs and their equivalents in the Swedish language. The aim of the contrastive analysis is to describe grammatical, semantic and stylistic-pragmatic effects of the verbal prefix ver- on the bases in German and to compare them with the corresponding effects of the prefix föron the Swedish bases. The research shows that the use of contrastive analysis as a strategy that helps to identify both similarities and differences between phenomena in the foreign and the source language can benefit learners of GAFL with Swedish as their first or second language in many ways. It gives them the possibility to study specific linguistic groups of German words while comparing them to the corresponding groups of Swedish words with regard to their forms and meanings, which makes the tedious memorization of separate words unnecessary. They will be able to guess many unknown words using some familiar pattern. They will also learn to identify certain regularities even among the exceptions, which will serve them as a clue for translation.