Das lokomotische Satzmodell: Satztopologie im Unterricht der Primarstufe

This paper introduces a didactical concept and teaching material enabling elementary school students (fourth graders) to identify and explore sentence-syntax, syntactical constituents and sentence-types within a ‘railroad’-placement-game. The paper starts by presenting the topological model of the German sentence (cf. Höhle 1986; Wöllstein 2014) as a kind of ‘multi-tool’ for several areas of grammar-teaching in elementary school. Thereafter, the basic principles of the sentence-model are explained to demonstrate their template-like character (c.f. Christ 2015) in the analysis. Main part of the article is the conversion of this linguistic tool into a functional approach and teaching material for elementary school teaching, the locomotive sentence model. This approach and material has been developed for and tested with two difference fourth-grade classes in northern Germany.