Das Imaginäre als Teil des Fremdsprachenunterrichts

Abstract

"The Imaginary as the Part of the Foreign Language Education. Inner images (visual mental representations) undoubtedly constitute an intrinsic part of our personal world. They are independent of external visual stimuli and they are stored in the brain. Associative relations – as part of the speaker's individual lexicon in his semantic memory – are evoked in one’s memory as ready-made units. Instead of a purely cognitive transfer of materials, they serve – together with visual mental representations – as a support for sensory-reflexive and imaginative-creative processing of themes. The recall of these units in the memory can be supported by works of art. It is the figurative-iconic process of storage in the memory – which takes place in the educational process in parallel with the linguistic-conceptual one – that significantly contributes to a deeper and more permanent consolidation of the learning materials. The integration of works of art into foreign language education thus not only supports the development of language competence, but also the aestheticization of the learner. The article presents new didactic procedures in teaching German as a foreign language through works of fine art. Keywords: visual mental representations, associative relations, works of art, foreign language education, aestheticization "