Plenary sessions

• 9:00 – 10:40
• Room: B212
• Chair: Štefan Beňuš
• online session

1. Sandra Reitbrecht
Vocabulary progression in German learning from a morphological perspective

Acquiring scientific, technical or professional language skills is a key learning objective for a large number of German learners worldwide. From a morphological point of view, these are registers for whose vocabulary word formation processes such as derivation are of great importance. At the same time, however, German is usually learnt as a second or additional foreign language. This situation raises the questions of how learners can be familiarised with the morphological structures of German vocabulary at a very early stage and how morphological awareness can contribute to competence development in German as a foreign language. Based on this, the article first introduces the constructs of morphological awareness and derivational knowledge and then presents individual didactic principles of morphological instruction. Finally, the vocabulary in Profile Deutsch (Glaboniat et al., 2005) at levels A1 and A2 is analysed to determine whether it provides a basis for morphological instruction.

Keywords: derivational knowledge, morphological instruction, vocabulary progression.

2. Anita Muho
Moving from Traditional Tests to Real-Life Skill Assessments in Foreign Language Learning

This study examines the shift in foreign language teaching from traditional written tests to real-life skill assessments, highlighting methods like dialogues, role-playing, and cultural projects. These methods aim to assess students‘ practical language skills and cultural competence, overcoming the shortcomings of traditional assessments, which frequently fail to measure oral proficiency and contextual communication. This study emphasizes the increasing importance of authentic, task-oriented assessment, based on frameworks such as communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980) and language assessment theory (Bachman & Palmer, 2010). Using qualitative case studies from diverse language programs, the study examines curriculum designs, teacher experiences, and student feedback to compare traditional assessments with skill-based assessments. The findings indicate real-life assessments enhance students’ communication abilities, cultural awareness, and involvement. Nevertheless, challenges like the requirement for extra resources, training for teachers, and standardized evaluation criteria remain. This study provides recommendations to address these issues, such as creating training programs for teachers, incorporating various cultural contexts, and utilizing technology to enhance practice and assessments. It is also recommended to use clear rubrics and benchmarks to achieve a balance between standardization and flexibility. This approach aims to better prepare students for global interactions and lifelong language use by aligning assessments with real-world communication needs.

Keywords: Real-life assessments, foreign language learning, task-based evaluation, cultural competence, communicative skills.

3. Esther Álvarez de la Fuente & Raquel Fernández Fuertes
Interpreting as a natural skill: from family interactions to classroom application

Natural translation or natural interpretation (NI) — performed by bilingual speakers without formal training—has received little attention in bilingualism studies, as it is often considered unfairly a byproduct of linguistic competence development (e.g., Harris, 1980, 2013; Álvarez de la Fuente and Fernández Fuertes, 2015, 2024; Hornáčková Klapicová, 2021; Álvarez de la Fuente et al., 2019). Similarly, the field of translation has largely dismissed it, regarding it as non-professional and rudimentary (see Álvarez de la Fuente and Fernández Fuertes, 2012 for a review). However, the NI performed by bilingual children exhibits unique characteristics linked to linguistic and pragmatic factors and it is a recurrent phenomenon that occurs in early bilingual oral production, regardless of the bilingual children’s language pair (Álvarez de la Fuente and Fernández Fuertes, 2024). This phenomenon occurs in tandem with the linguistic growth of two languages in bilingual family contexts but it may ocurr also in other bilingual settings, such as second-language learning classrooms. In fact, in recent years, teaching practices such as translanguaging or linguistic mediation incorporate translation tasks to enhance second-language or multilingual learners’ linguistic skills (e.g, Stathopoulou 2015; Corcoll López and González-Davies, 2016; Smentek 2017; Portolés Falomir and Laguna 2017). By doing so, it is possible to transfer to a bilingual educational context the processes that naturally occur in a family bilingual acquisition setting. Additionally, analyzing language contact phenomena such as NI can provide valuable strategies for optimizing formal second-language instruction.

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