Open Access

This paper takes a comparative look at the development of preschools and kindergartens in Western Europe. Although preschool attendance has now become a normal part of children’s life-course over the whole of Western Europe, countries have taken different paths at varied speeds to reach this common point. Kindergarten pioneers as well as late developers are identified. Until the 1960s, the most powerful driver of preschool development was competition over pedagogical hegemony between State and Church.

This doctoral dissertation investigates the linguistic performance of German elementary school English teachers and how their second language (L2) English performance relates to their students' acquisition of English as a foreign language. The studies reflect the teachers' L2 language performance, give insights into the interrelationships of the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) dimensions of L2 language production, and finally address how linguistic performance relates to the students' L2 development. Following a mixed-methods approach, the first study analyzed the language performance elicited in semi-structured qualitative interviews with eleven German elementary school English teachers based on CAF measures. The second study focuses on the students' language development of a sub-set of four of the interviewed teachers. The students (N = 132) were given picture pointing tasks of either receptive grammar, receptive vocabulary or both at two times during the fourth year of elementary school. The key finding was that the whole group’s mean grammar score significantly improved from time one to time two. The increase of the mean vocabulary score was not statistically significant. When the students were grouped with their respective teachers, comparisons exposed significant differences between some of the groups. The third study synthesizes the teachers’ CAF performance and the students’ development in receptive English grammar and vocabulary. A principal components analysis (PCA) first calculated the variability of the range of the measures for complexity, accuracy, and fluency and their contributions to each CAF dimension. Correlation analyses between the dimensions revealed several robust significant correlations for complexity, accuracy, and fluency as captured in breakdown fluency and speed fluency. Repair fluency and lexical diversity correlated with breakdown and speed fluency, but not with accuracy and complexity. Based on the teachers’ composite CAF scores calculated in the PCA and the students’ test scores, the relationships between the teachers’ language performances and their students’ L2 development were analyzed. Multiple regression analyses retained breakdown fluency, measured in the number and length of pauses as part of the fluency dimension, as the only dimension significantly predicting the students’ receptive grammar development. The results point to several conclusions: First, the significant correlations between complexity, accuracy, and fluency in terms of breakdown and speed fluency indicate that the dimensions did not come at the expense of one another in the L2 performance on the cross-sectional interview task used in this study. Second, the students’ significant improvement in receptive English grammar implies some positive development of elementary school L2 English as a whole. However, the high variability among the students’ scores indicates other factors being at play in the children’s L2 development in addition to the teachers’ performance investigated in this study. Third, breakdown fluency as a specific feature of the teachers’ spoken language performance may have a beneficial effect on the children’s receptive English grammar acquisition. This finding is in line with observations of pausing as an element of L2 teacher talk as well as a prosodic feature in child-directed speech in first language acquisition that potentially aids language learners in segmenting linguistic input. The findings propose that future research take into consideration specific features in the L2 input and examine them as possible factors in children’s L2 language acquisition. Der Anhang dieser Veröffentlichung steht ebenfalls als elektronische Publikation im Internet kostenfrei (Open Access) zur Verfügung unter: http://dx.doi.org/10.18442/084

Tropical wetlands maintain a high biodiversity and provide ecological services which are basis for millions of livelihoods. However, freshwater ecosystems are largely neglected in research and environmental policy. Today they are among the most threatened habitat types throughout the world with highest loss rates for natural inland wetlands in the tropics. The high dependency of local communities upon natural resources makes conservation management for wetlands in developing countries to a particular challenge. This study investigated the different perspectives of conservation planning at Lake Alaotra, the largest wetland complex of Madagascar. First, the ecological state of Lake Alaotra was assessed to close knowledge gaps and to provide an adequate basis for ecosystem-based conservation measures. Second, I evaluated the community-led management of a small protected area in order to determine its potentials and weaknesses. Third, the local fishery, as the largest lake resource user group, was investigated to understand the drivers of overfishing. By interlinking the results of the three perspectives of conservation planning – ecology, management and resource user – interrelations and trade-offs between the three dimensions were identified. The current ecological state of Lake Alaotra reveals that the anthropogenic disturbance is favoring the proliferation of invasive plant species and leading to the alteration of the water quality (e. g. hypoxia). Insights into the local management show that the community-based management contributes to the conservation of the natural flora and fauna. However, the small-scale conservation area suffers from isolation and illegal activities, while its management lacks recognition at community level. The fishery sector has grown dramatically although fish catches have fallen sharply. Species composition changes and low reproduction rates are reflecting the fishing pressure. A high population growth and lacking agricultural land force people to enter fishery and increases the human pressure on the lake. Overall this study shows that the conservation of multiple-value ecosystems, such as tropical wetlands in developing countries, require site-specific multidimensional approaches that interlink ecological demands, resource user needs and the local sociocultural setting. This research demonstrates that: ongoing livelihood dynamics linked to the socio-economic conditions have to be considered to create more realistic management policies; strengthening resource users’ assets will help to decrease the human pressure on the already considerably altered ecosystem; capacity building for local management associations and the adoption of local ideas and management concepts is needed to enable the evolvement of an locally legitimated and tailored wetland conservation management.

Accessible communication is easy to find, easy to perceive, easy to understand and is related to the previous knowledge of the recipients. Target groups may have special communication needs necessitated by sensory, cognitive or psychological impairment, low education or critical life events such as illness, loss of reference persons or forced migration. When texts fail to address the needs of these target groups, they become barriers to successful interaction: sensory and cognitive barriers, media and culture barriers, language or specialized language barriers or even motoric barriers. Accessible communication comprises all measures to prevent texts (oral or written) from becoming a barrier for the intended target groups. This is a broad field of action that comprises, but goes way beyond Easy and Plain Language: A text could be written in Easy Language but the intended users have no access to it; a text may not be well perceived and therefore not understood; a text may be accessible online, but directed to users with different media preferences; a text may be easy to perceive and understand but not acceptable with respect to the politeness requirements of the users. What good are such texts to the target audience? This paper, that was held as Plenary Speech on the 2019 Klaara Network conference, focuses on Easy Language and Accessible Communication in Germany and discusses communication barriers and the conditions of communicative accessibility for people with diverse needs in the light of the following questions: What road have we travelled thus far? Where are we right now? Have we really covered all necessary aspects of accessibility? Where do we go from here?

The study of vegetation-plot data on a broad geographical scale is of increasing importance in vegetation science. It significantly contributes to the transnational characterisation of vegetation types as well as the better understanding of their large-scale patterns and to habitat typologies, which are important for decision-making processes in European nature conservation. I examined semi-natural, saline and brackish Baltic Sea grasslands which occur on sedimentary flats at the transition between land and sea. Their diverse vegetation is dependent on low intensity grazing (Dijkema 1990). This valuable part of the European cultural landscape (Küster 2004), which is recognized as Annex I priority habitat type (Natura 2000; European Commission 2013), underwent an overall decrease in quality and quantity within the last 150 years, which is frequently related to abandonment. Thus, the coastal grasslands of the Baltic Sea have been assessed as Endangered in the European Red List of Habitats (Janssen et al. 2016). Within this thesis I (i) developed a proposal to integrate vegetation data using non-standard scales into general vegetation analyses, (ii) characterised the vegetation of Baltic Sea grasslands on transnational level, (iii) regarded them from a North-west European perspective, (iv) discussed their nature conservation aspects on European scale, (v) investigated changes in their plant species composition and discussed its possible relation to cessation of grazing and (vi) formulated a monitoring concept important for management planning in nature conservation.