The staging of linguistic competence in the writing of abstracts in DaF (German as a foreign language): a case study on the usage, function and production of predicative phrases with als

Abstract

This paper discusses the notion of linguistic staging as applied to the field of German as a Foreign Language (DaF). We thus propose a concept of staging of linguistic competence as a strategic procedure by which the scientific academic literacy of writers is enacted in a foreign language. Through staging, learners show linguistic competence to formulate complex structures and to express routines and actions of conventionalized language in the target discourse. We hold that linguistic enacting can be expressed through specific structures as well as through processes of selection of terms. This conjecture is discussed based on the predicative use of syntagmas beginning with als, which, due to this structure's functional and semantic properties, can be seen as a means for linguistic staging. The corpus is comprised of abstracts written in German by Brazilian doctoral and master's students, and of "think aloud" protocols of the production of those texts. The data suggest that writers often find it difficult to carry out syntactic plans beginning with als and to choose the correct verbs for arguments beginning with als. Nonetheless, two strategies of linguistic staging were identified during the study: paraphrasing and accessing semantically concrete concepts before taking up abstract concepts.