National Report of “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Lesen und Schreiben“ 2007

National Report of “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Lesen und Schreiben“ 2007
(German Society for Reading and Writing – Section of IRA)

Submitted by: Renate Valtin, IDEC member and president of DGLS

About the DGLS
The German Society for Reading and Writing was founded in 1968 and recently was commended by IRA for 35 years’ contribution toward promotion of reading instruction. It has about 500 members. Current board members are: Renate Valtin (president), Monika Dräger (vice-president), Bernhard Hofmann (treasurer), Erika Huth (secretary), Norbert Kruse, Ada Sasse and Andreas Schroeder.
The organization can be reached via the website www.dgls.de.

Major activities in the time period of report: July 2007 to January 2008

Publications:
Volumes 7/8 of the series „Beiträge der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Lesen und Schreiben“ with the title „Checkpoint Literacy. Der 15. Europäische Lesekongress“ are in print, edited by Bernhard Hofmann and Renate Valtin. The two volumes contain contributions to the European Reading Congress in German language.
A book of abstracts of the 15th European Reading Congress has been edited by Bernhard Hofmann.

Congresses:
Together with IDEC the DGLS run the 16th European Conference on Reading “Checkpoint Literacy”, August 5-8, 20007, in Berlin at the Humboldt University. Dr. Annette Schavan,
Federal Minister of Education and Research was patron of the conference.
It was the biggest European Congress until now, with nearly 600 participants. The power point presentations of the three main speakers Andreas Schleicher, OECD, Pirjo Linnakylä, University of Jyväskylä, Finland and Allan Luke, University of Queensland, Australia as well as articles of English and French speaking participants can be seen in the net on the IDEC website. The publication of these articles has been made possible by financial support of the Ministry of Education and Research of Germany.

The annual meeting for members took place from Nov. 30 to Dec. 2007 at Schloss Rauischholzhausen. The topic of the meeting was: What is good instruction in reading and writing?

Important projects run by our IRA members:

Renate Valtin is member of the German team of PIRLS 2001 and PIRLS 2006 (the team published four books up to now about the results) and of the Reading Expert Group of PIRLS 2006. She also participated in the data analysis and publication of PIRLS 2006 in Luxembourg.