Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional model of the variety of English taught in German secondary schools

English as it is taught in German schools (Schulenglisch) is often perceived to be radically different from natural English, as used outside the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. Previous corpus studies have confirmed that individual lexico-grammatical features are indeed often misrepresented in EFL textbooks used in Germany. This study presents an empirical multi-feature and multi-dimensional (MDA) analysis of the language of three series of EFL textbooks (15 textbook volumes) used at lower secondary school level in Germany, as compared to three target language reference corpora. Principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to identify the defining linguistic characteristics of Schulenglisch along three dimensions of linguistic variation: 1) ‘Written informational vs. Spoken interactional’, 2) ‘Fictional narrative’ and 3) ‘Didactised vs. Real-life English’. The distributions of texts on the first and second dimensions show that Schulenglisch is characterised by an underdifferentiation of register-based variation as compared to ‘real-life’, extra-curricular English. Mixed-effects models show that this finding is consistent across all three textbook series. Intra-textbook variation is mediated – to varying degrees on each of the three dimensions of the model – by text register, the proficiency level targeted by the textbooks, and interactions between these variables. In line with lay beliefs about Schulenglisch, the largest gap between Schulenglisch and extra-curricular English is observed in the conversation register. This gap persists even as textbook proficiency level increases. Compared to transcripts of natural, everyday conversations, Schulenglisch conversation significantly underrepresents key features of spontaneous, interactional spoken English, such as discourse makers, fillers, negation, contracted verbs, demonstratives, and it-pronouns. At the same time, it overrepresents features more typical of written, informative writing such as nouns, prepositions, and high lexical density and diversity. Across all registers, linguistic features that are typical of Schulenglisch, especially at the lower levels of proficiency, include imperatives, can as a modal, politeness markers and question forms.