In the latest decade, the number of students learning German in Swedish upper secondary school has decreased. Thus, a quantitative study was conducted where German teachers as well as pupils learning German discussed the role of the German language in school and for future, professional prospects. This study investigates German learner’s general attitude towards the subject and discusses what kind of actions should be taken in order to attract and motivate more students to choose and to continue their German studies in school. Moreover, in order to answer my research questions, the reformation of the grade point enhancement “meritpoängssytemet” has been taken into account to investigate to what extent extrinsic motivation in the form of extra credits motivate students to take more advanced German classes offered in upper secondary schools. More information about the benefits with German knowledge was through this study identified as a possible action to motivate more students to learn German. Furthermore, the result of this study shows that the grade point enhancement is the most crucial factor to motivate students to take more advanced courses in German. Hence, the teachers encourage the idea of changing the system with extra credits to make more pupils interested in taking the German 5 class. However, the result shows that the group of students was equally extrinsically and intrinsically motivated to learn German 4. This indicates that besides reintroducing the grade point enhancement for German 5, the joy and pleasure in learning German should be stimulated as well in order to affirm the intrinisically motivated students.

The following study examines what kind of texts learners encounter in different textbooks, if these texts are constructed or authentic (already published), and if this has, or can have, any meaning for the learningprocess of the students. The chosen textbooks, Das Dach 4 (2007), Genau! 4 (2008), Der Sprung! 4 (2011) and Alles Deutsch: oder was? 9 (2016), are analysed with a comparative method and with a literaturedidactic theoretic framework. The study determined that most textbooks only have a small amount of authentic texts and that an even smaller amount are both authentic and literary. One of the textbooks diverse from the others, as about half of the total amount of texts are authentic. In all of the textbooks most of the authentic texts are stories, poems, songs and recipies, and the most common texts overall are stories and dialogs. In contrast to the curriculum for german as a second language in Sweden, none of the textbooks had a play in it. To most of the authentic texts there are no tasks at all. The teacher can therefore choose how the students are supposed to work with the texts and what kind of competences are supposed to be fostered and developed. The study also shows that the texts and their tasks mainly are supposed to foster the learners' verbal skill and their textual understandig. The discussion indicates that reading can foster the language skills of the students, and shows that it is possible that reading not only developes the skill of textual understanding, but also understanding for the structure of the language itself.

This two-part study investigates the word frequency of a total of 1296 vocabularies presented in the textbooks Digilär Tyska 3 and Lieber Deutsch 3 2.0, which correspond to the language proficiency level A2. The aim of the study was to investigate to what extent the designated vocabulary in the two textbooks represents the most frequent words in the German language. To determine this, the study was divided into two parts: In the first part, a quantitative study was conducted to answer the following research question: To what extent does the vocabulary in two German textbooks used in Swedish upper secondary schools represent the most frequent words in the German language? The chapter vocabularies were compared to the corpus-based frequency dictionary A Frequency Dictionary of German which lists the 4034 most frequent words in the German language. This study showed that both textbooks provided a high coverage of high frequency words with a percentage of 78% and 73%. Additionally, the vocabularies belonging to the vocabulary excerises in Digilär Tyska 3 were investigated and the result showed that 62% of these words had a low frequency and were not included in the frequency dictionary. Due to this low frequency coverage in the vocabulary exercises a need for a second part of the study was identified to investigate whether this vocabulary, despite its low frequency would still be important for the students to learn. Therefore, a second study with the following two research questions was conducted: Which themes do the low frequent words belong to? To what extent would each word separately in a low frequent composition come across as high frequent?The analyses in the second part of this study showed that the most dominating themes among the low frequency words were describing words, animals, hobbies and other. Consequently, it was argued that these themes could be relevant to address the students’ varying interests. Furthermore, the frequency analysis of the low frequency compositions showed that 13.8 % of the low frequency words could be seen as high frequent when the frequency of each word within a composition was taken into account. Based on these results, it was argued that students learning German with the help of these textbooks would encounter many high frequency words. However, it was stressed that frequency alone cannot be the only deciding factor when identifying the adequate vocabulary for language learners. Motivational aspects such as incorporating vocabulary belonging to themes that students have an interest in would be another important factor that needs to be taken into account when choosing vocabulary. Furthermore, it was argued that teachers should incorporate strategies for German word composition to increase their students’ vocabulary range.

This Diploma thesis deals with the project teaching and with the options of implementation of this method into second language teaching in the first level of elementary schools. Theoretical part of the thesis focuses on history, characteristics, classification, phases, advantages and disadvantages of the project teaching. In the second part, the thesis is based on a five-hour long project called "Berlin entdecken" created by the author and realized in the fifth year of elementary school with the extended second language teaching specialization. The thesis aims to find out students' attitude towards the project teaching. Also, based on a case study, it tries to find out whether the integration of this teaching method is applicable to teaching process among students with different education expectations. The research draws on both quantitative and qualitative methods (i.e. questionnaire, observation, and structured interview). Based on the carried out research, the thesis find out that the project teaching is an appropriate method for second language teaching in the first level of elementary schools. Similarly to other methods, however, the project teaching also has its constraints which need to be taken into consideration. KEYWORDS hands-on teaching perspective, project teaching, second language...

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The aim of this diploma thesis is to show the possibilities of using the Internet in order to make language learning more effective. In the centre of attention is the language learning at secondary schools in the Czech Republic. The aims, contents and particularities of teaching German at secondary schools in the Czech Republic are defined at the beginning, followed by a discussion about convenient didactic methods according to the educational theories. Internet tools and other its characteristics, which could contribute to the efficiency improvement of language teaching, are also introduced. The thesis also pays attention to the specialized terminology. In the practical part, we can find, at first, some specific prerequisites of using the Internet in teaching a foreign language. We can also find some concrete examples of using the Internet as a support in teaching with regards to the established educational aims. All is based on my own teaching experience and on an extensive internet and foreign literature research. Some useful internet web pages are also mentioned. The thesis shows that the Internet offers quite a lot of possibilities which could, in a way, contribute to efficiency improvement in teaching German.

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