Interlingual factors for the determination of the difficulty degree of German set phrases for learners of German as a foreign language with Greek as L1

In phraseodidactic research there is a broad agreement upon the fact that collocational fluency is a significant factor of language fluency. For this reason high frequency and common set phrases with a high relevance in written and oral communication should be subject to systematic teaching. However, we still have insufficient knowledge about the proper learning progression that accounts for an adequate sequence of introducing set phrases according to the degree of difficulty in the lesson of German as a foreign language. Progression is not to be organized in purely formal terms, but rather in terms that involve factors such as the age, the genre, the association with speech acts and the Li-knowledge. Especially the formal, semantic and pragmatic congruency of L1 and L2 is an essential factor that affects the degree of difficulty and subsequently the burden of learning associated with set phrases. The present study focuses on a subset of the phraseological core vocabulary ("Optimum") by Hallsteinsdottir et al. (2006) which consists of the 142 representative, i.e. frequent and common, set phrases in German. It aims to determine their difficulty degree for learners with Greek as Ll by highlighting the interlingual equivalence relations by means of methods of contrastive linguistics: L1-L2 proximity is assumed to have a positive impact on learning reducing the learning burden, whereas lack of proximity is assumed to increase the difficulty degree. In line with the results of the interlingual contrastive survey, proposals are formulated for a comprehensible learning progression that provides continuity in the development of phraseological competence based on the common reference levels of language proficiency.