This survey article focuses on the status quo as well as the historical development of cooperative and collaborative learning in Germany. Due to the growing social, cultural and ethnic diversity in Germany, cooperation and communication are overall goals in all official curricula and are considered as key qualifications (Finkbeiner, 1995) for a successful school and job career in a highly diverse society. For instance, the recent PISA study (Program for International Students’ Assessment) put major emphasis on the ...

According to Cohn, human beings are both a psycho-biological unit and a part of the universe. They are at the same time autonomous and interdependent (Cohn 1984). The results from this study show, however, that there are still many learners both at secondary school and at university who have neither learnt to think about their reading behaviour nor how to evaluate and change their reading processes and futhermore, nor how to aim at and achieve goals in a more purposeful way. Most of the subjects in the investigation ...

Generic interpretations as in “The tiger kills to survive” have often been observed to reconstitute the linguistic acceptability of certain verb argument structure modifications. But can the right context rescue everything? This paper investigates the impact a generic interpretation can have on three types of argument alternations: (i) the intransitive use of inherently telic verbs like “to kill”, (ii) the intransitive use of stative verbs like “to love”, and (iii) middle alternations like “it reads easily”. It will ...

The article is based on an empirical project that explored linguistic and educational needs from 1990 till 1992 for future Europe. The matter of discussion attends to the question whether 'action-oriented' foreign language teaching taking place between the constraints of the pluralistic society, the pedagogic freedom of the teacher and the demands, needs and interests of the pupil is a vicious circle or not. Therefore the multifarious conditions of language teaching are focussed. The following spheres are pointed out ...