Deconstructing the myth of Standard German: Navigating language ideologies in the L2 German university classroom.

Previous research has established a connection between Standard Language Ideology (SLI) and prestige and power and has highlighted the existence of a dominant cultural narrative that idealizes Standard High German as a provider of cultural elevation and unity, viewing nonstandard Germanic varieties as exotic. Nevertheless, scholars have likewise emphasized the importance of familiarizing L2 German students with the standard and nonstandard regional and dialectal varieties that are widely used within and across Germanic‐speaking countries. Through a grounded ethnographic approach involving classroom observations and interviews, the study suggests that the L2 German university students observed seemed to believe in the superiority of Standard German despite efforts by their instructors to counter this belief. The study extends previous research by illustrating L2 German instructors' negotiation strategies, used to highlight the communicative legitimacy of German and Austrian dialects to their students. The Challenge: Public university foreign language curricula often place an emphasis on grammar and correctness in their navigation of language teaching. Yet, such an emphasis fails to account for the nuanced ways languages are actually spoken in their countries of origin. How does the mismatch between prescribed teaching curricula on the one hand and actual language use on the other hand play out for L2 German instructors and students in the public university classroom? More particularly, how do such instructors and students negotiate the tension between standard academic German on the one hand and German and Austrian dialects on the other? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]