Phraseological units in graded readers for German as a foreign language at A1 and A1/A2 levels: didactic treatment and phraseodidactic implications

Abstract

Phraseological units are a relevant component of communicative competence and pose specific difficulties in foreign language learning due to their formal fixedness, varying degrees of idiomaticity, and frequent pragmatic and cultural load. This study analyses the presence and didactic treatment of phraseological units in ten graded readers for German as a foreign language classified by the publishers as A1 or A1/A2. The corpus comprises works published by CIDEB, Cornelsen, Klett, Klett/Langenscheidt, and Liebaug-Dartmann. On the basis of a manual extraction, the study examines the number of phraseological units identified, their textual contextualisation, the presence of glosses or explanations, and their reuse in activities. The results show 105 phraseological units, of which only 29 receive some form of explanation and 8 are integrated into activities. The analysis confirms considerable heterogeneity across publishers and reveals that the presence of phraseologisms does not necessarily entail systematic phraseodidactic exploitation. On the basis of these findings, the article proposes guidelines for a more gradual, explicit, and contextualised integration of phraseology into beginner-level GFL materials.