Intercultural understanding with topic-specific literary texts:
On the reconstruction of the German homeland theme for German literature lessons in China

In foreign language didactics, the use of literary texts has long been legitimised for the learning objective of understanding foreign languages and intercultural understanding. However, the teaching of foreign-language literature is only worthwhile if the special characteristics of the foreign-cultural reader position, i.e. learner-related factors such as life experiences, perspectives and culture-specific reception conditions, are taken into account. So far, however, there has been little empirical research into the question of how and to what extent foreign-language literary texts can promote a particular group of learners' understanding of themselves and others.

In my dissertation project, I address this research desideratum specifically in the field of literary didactics of German as a foreign language and attempt to conduct qualitative reception research based on the fundamental German theme of "Heimat". A central task of the empirical project is to record and analyse topic-specific learner conceptions and text comprehension processes of Chinese students of German studies.

The project is organised within the research framework of the Didactic Reconstruction model. Using this model, an attempt is made to link the cultural-historical and literary interpretations of the German homeland topic as subject-specific clarifications on the one hand and the learners' life-world experiences, ideas and topic-related text comprehension on the other, to consider them equally and to lead to didactic structuring using an iterative approach. The aim of didactic structuring is to legitimise topic-specific literary texts in terms of their suitability and potential for text work in foreign German lessons.

The empirical data collection is based on a combination of methods consisting of an associogram, a guided interview, a reading protocol and a retrospective interview. The qualitative content analysis method according to Mayring is primarily used to analyse the collected data.