Literalität in erzählenden Texten : Indikatoren zur Beurteilung der Literalität

Telling stories is part of the core patterns of language use. Whereas children at pre-school age usually acquire basic oral skills, they will also learn to write story-telling texts and to develop functional written narrative skills, once they have attended primary school. At secondary school, other types of writing, such as reports and descriptions, become more important. To date, we know very little about how narrative skills develop and how they are linked to the written skills required for reports and descriptions. In this corpus-based paper, ten mainly linguistic indicators and their use are presented in order to assess main components of literacy (e.g. title, contextualization, use of anaphors for linking purposes, means of structuring texts). On the basis of a corpus of texts written by pupils of the grades 2, 5, and 9 years, who were exposed to pictures as a writing impulse, the development of literacy degrees is examined in a (partially) false longitudinal study. In a detailed follow-up study the types of texts produced by the pupils will be investigated by taking into account whether German was their L1 or L2. Additionally, the analysis focuses on correlations between literacy indicators and the linguistic means used by the pupils. The paper ends with a short summary and an outlook concerning further research.