Accepting the Linguistic Challenge: How a Primary School Group Handles a Cloze Text

All schooling depends on sufficient linguistic abilities. Descriptions of linguistic qualifications are generally based on the identification of those linguistic competencies that the institution school expects children to dispose of. Unlike this approach, we focus what children are actually able to do. This article presents a passage of a videotaped teaching situation, part of a case study which was conducted at a primary school group of a German 4th grade. The fine-grained reconstruction of the communicative interactions in a small group of children tackling an exercise, i.e. a doze text, shows how complex their verbal productivity has developed yet. It is shown, how and to which extent the basic linguistic qualifications interdigitate in their communicative actions. This raises several demands regarding the conceptualization and the practice of language diagnostic tests and trainings and a necessary review of the construction of academic expectations: Particular attention should be given to the basic linguistic qualifications in the breadth of their dimensions.