Die Didaktisierung von Phraseologismen im DaF-Unterricht anhand multimodaler Texte

Semantically complex units cover a high percentage of the lexicon of a language, ranging from collocations or routine formula to proverbs. The difficulty for learners of a foreign language lies in the fact that in many cases the meaning of those elements of the lexicon does not result just from addition of the meaning of individual constituents. Although (active and passive) knowledge about such lexical elements can be considered essential for successful communication in a foreign language, there still exists a lack (we focus on German as a foreign language, but we assume that the situation is comparable for other languages) of up-to-date and authentic didactic material that takes into account the characteristics of semantically complex units and the learners' cognitive strategies to analyze their meaning. In this paper we develop a didactic model that describes the use of magazine advertisements in teaching German as a foreign language. Due to their multimodality (e.g. the combination of verbal and visual elements) the texts allow the learners to better understand and actively use semantically complex units, even with a low competence level. In order to illustrate our didactic approach we present 5 advertisements that we have used with learners of German in their first and second year at a French university. It turns out that not only can phraseology be conveyed in an efficient way but that other educational objectives, such as a general increase of the learners' motivation, can be achieved.