The multimodal сontent of the first German language teaching manuals

Abstract

The information explosion caused by the invention of printing in the middle of the 15th century, the Reformation and Luther’s activities led to the elevation of the German language to the level of “high” languages in which it was possible to teach in German schools in addition to the three sacred languages. For the first time, the German language became not only an object of description, but also an object of instruction in German schools, where, along with the abacus and the basics of the Law of God, they taught reading and writing in their native German. There is a need not only for linguistic comprehension of the German language, but also for its introduction into teaching. The communicative practices presented in the first literacy manuals in German reflect a multimodal process carried out through three main information channels — verbal, prosodic and visual. The article describes the formation of the process of integrating verbal information, focused primarily on the teacher, with prosodic (syllabification, onomatopoeia and sound production, etc.) and non-verbal, visual, information contained in tables, graphics and pictures (taking into account gestures, facial expressions, etc.), designed for the student. The objectives of the article are to describe the functional interaction and the invasive potential of verbal, visual, sound and graphic signs in the process of communication when teaching literacy in German. The content of the analyzed literacy manuals of the 16th–17th centuries, compiled by Valentin Ikelzamer, Fabian Frank, Peter Jordan, Ortolph Fuchsberger, etc., demonstrates the dynamics of the development of this type of text from monomodal verbal manuals, through the inclusion of tables and diagrams in the verbal text to the integrative embedding of a picture (image) in a verbal context and the “centric” inclusion of a staged image, in which the leading role is given to the image, and the verbal part acts as an explanation.