Konstruktivismus als neue Leitwissenschaft für das Sprachenlernen? Ideengeber und Prüfstein

The author starts out from a review of the relationship between language didactics and other fields of research giving inspiration to it (learning psychology, linguistics, second language acquisition research, anthropology), exploring whether constructivism might be one of these fields. He criticizes that in order to explain constructivist perspectives on learning, constructivists tend to use „instructionalism” as a background against which to position their own ideas, „instructionalism”, however, being a construct of outdated, if not invalid, positions. He describes fundamental principles of constructivism and their application to language didactics, maintaining that many didactic recommendations originate from a superficial transfer of hypotheses on brain function onto learning activities. Nevertheless constructivism proves its use as an idea generator and touchstone.