This research deals with problems of psychogenesis by immigrants, known in Germany as ‘resettlers’. They reimmigrate to Germany having spent about two hundred years in Russia, and need to be integrated here. On this basis of findings (interviews and figures) some conclusions can be drawn about their feelings, emotions and mental perceptions in connection with the reimmigration. This knowledge has to be interpreted in the context of the German language course which adult learners visit in the first year of their stay in Germany. This interpretation is important, because the various emotional factors influence the successful integration of adults during their learning process.
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This article deals with methodological problems in studying the writing process in L1 und L2. The data used for illustration are film narratives of Chafe’s "Pear Film“. The informants had to retell the film in two written versions (L1 und L2), accompanied by audio recorded thinking aloud. In addition, retrospective interviews were carried out with the informants. The data from Think Aloud Protocols (TAPs) used in translation tasks lead to a number of interesting results with respect to evidence for lexical/communicative strategies. For gaining insight into the writing process, however, TAPs do not seem to be as fruitful. Is this due to the more complex task or only to idiosyncratic differences between the different sets of informants? Which parts of a verbalization process are prone to occur in a TAP and which are not? Can the information from the TAPs be more accessible if combined with other data? The article discusses these questions and proposes triangulation of different kinds of data as indispensable for gaining insight into the process of writing.
The use of romaji (romanised representation of Japanese) for teaching Japanese learners with alphabetic mother tongues has been widely criticised by researchers and educators, who claim a negative effect on pronunciation when romaji script is used. To empirically investigate the relation between the learners’ pronunciation of Japanese and possible phonological interferences from their mother tongues triggered by romaji script, three experiments (i.e. word naming, lexical judgement and text reading) were conducted in order to compare accuracy and speed in processing Japanese presented in romaji and in kana (Japanese mora scipt). The results indicate that learners of Japanesw with alphabetic mother tongues process romaji-presented words and texts twice as fast as those written in kana. Phonological interferences are therefore not caused by the use of romaji script; rather, the high efficiency in processing romaji-presented Japanese indicates certain instructional benefits for learners with alphabetic mother languages.