Was bleibt? Vokabelerwerb im Fremdsprachenunterricht. Fallstudie zu einer Schülergruppe an einem schwedischen Gymnasium

Sammanfattning: In this research project the question is raised whether it is possible to detect and analyse differences between incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition within a traditional, systematic teaching setting of German as an L3. The ten par-ticipating Swedish students at the upper secondary level worked with two differ-ent German newspaper articles in two different ways. One set of lessons focused mainly on textual content (incidental learning) while the other involved both dis-cussions about the contents of the text and explicit vocabulary practice (inten-tional learning). The students were later tested on four separate occasions using a self-report-test involving 16 pre-tested words. The two main research questions are: How many of the encountered words will the students recall and what depth of knowledge does this recall represent? Results point to a very limited vocabu-lary acquisition through incidental learning compared to the acquisition through intentional learning which gave a higher score. The overall tendency is for ac-quired vocabulary knowledge to change over time and more so if intentionally acquired. This raises a further question: How much and what kind of work in-volving texts is needed in the classroom for long lasting vocabulary acquisition, incidental or intentional, to take place? Furthermore the results indicate that the self-report test used in the research project shows deficiencies regarding validity as well as reliability issues, which puts further focus on the test methods used in educationally applied vocabulary acquisition research.