Wolf-Dieter Krause

• The text is one, if not the fundamental aspect of linguistic communication and should therefore also play a central role foreign language learning in educational establishments. In this article the author argues for an open concept of text, which includes as many products of linguistic communicative activity as possible. Language teaching is interpreted from a linguistic point of view as an intertextual phenomenon, which appears in various forms. Thus the teaching process as a whole can be described as a discourse between a number of participants. The teaching and learning process in the narrow sense moves between the poles of linguistic input, which is received by the learners, and linguistic output, the texts produced by the learners. The article discusses text-linguistic questions associated with the demonstration, model, initialising, information and control functions of the text input. The output of the learner is described in its specific qualities as a foreign-language text