In the present study we discuss the meaning of 'doing being competent' in a German language class in South Brazil, focusing on speakers of Hundsrückich (German-Brazilian dialect). Based on a social perspective of competence as produced and showed by the participants in social interaction (Firth, 2009), German-as-additional-language classroom talk-in-interactional data were analysed, segmented from a corpus of 15 hours audiovisual recordings in a language school in Brazil. The interactional sequences analysed featured occurrences of interactional practices through which participants made Hundsrückich speakers’s previous experience with German relevant in their doing being competent in basic and intermediate German classes. The analysis of the data showed that, for the participants to jointly produce and show competence, they display previous knowledge when the teacher or the colleagues demand it, they participate in the class activities answering teachers’ questions when the others don’t and they help colleagues do the tasks. The participants’ observable methods for doing being competent in class shed light on and question a commonly held belief of German teachers in South Brazil that Hudsrückish speakers are not good learners of standard German.
|
