Comma usage (especially commas between clauses) is the most error-prone area of German orthography. This difficulty is attributed, among other factors, to a teaching approach that fosters primarily explicit grammatical knowledge about clause types (adverbial clauses, relative clauses, etc.) and signal words (conjunctions, pronouns, etc.). This approach has been criticized for its reliance on unnecessarily complex rules and concepts, which potentially distract students from the actual defining feature of clauses: verbs (Bredel 2020). Alternative didactic approaches (notably Lindauer & Sutter 2005) therefore refrain from using grammatical terminology altogether and instead introduce metaphors (e.g., the verb as the ‘king’ of a clause ruling over its ‘subordinates’, i.e., phrases) to bring the students’ attention to underlying syntactic patterns.

So far, the effectiveness of these alternative approaches has not been evaluated empirically. The present intervention study Kompetenzentwicklung Kommasetzung in der Sekundarstufe und im Studium (‘KoKoSS’, ‘developing capitalization skills in secondary and university level education’) investigates whether a verb-based approach is more effective than the traditional teaching approach. Using a pre-post-follow-up design, the study examines the differential effectiveness of a verb-based vs. a traditional digital learning course in six lessons directed at fifth graders, eighth graders, and university students. The study is funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, German Research Foundation).

The proposed oral presentation will summarize and discuss the results regarding the effectiveness of the different didactic approaches. It will also briefly introduce the verb-based online tutorial which has been made available free of charge on the platform learningapps.org.

References:
[1] Lindauer, T. & Sutter, E. (2005). Könige, Königreiche und Kommaregeln. Praxis Detusch, 191, S. 28-35.

Keywords: Comma, intervention study, grammar instruction, German, syntax, L1 education.