Teaching Word Order Variation with a Constraint-Based View on Grammar

Abstract

One prominent linguistic feature of German is that it exhibits rather flexible word order in the so-called middle field. And while much theoretical research has been carried out on this phenomenon, not much of the insights gained there has been carried over to teaching German in schools (in fact, in many school text books, word order is depicted as rather rigid). Using optimality theory as an example, this article sketches how modern linguistic theories can be used in the classroom to teach aspects of the Grammar of German and to raise the language awareness of the students. For this, we lay out the basics of optimality theory (OT) and how it applies to word order variation, before we sketch different ways how the basic of OT can be taught to younger and older students and why this would be a perfect fit for the officially supported curricula of the German school system.