ABSTRACT
In many varieties of spoken German, the Präteritum (simple past) – with the exception of some verbs – is almost extinct (Dannerer 2012: 196). However, it is a standard tense in written German with a narrative function. In contrast, the Perfekt (present perfect) is the main tense with past time reference in spoken language. This way of using the tenses raises the question of how children acquire the Präteritum before they learn how to code and decode writing from a medial point of view. Against this background, it seems likely that the shared reading of picturebooks promotes children’s tense acquisition process by providing them with written and narrative contexts – that is, with the Präteritum in its prototypical use domain (Quasthoff 2002: 184).
