Abstract:

Contemporary autobiographical text excerpts serve as a good inspiration for biographical writing, as the reader encounters autobiographical elements with regard to topics such as childhood, youth, school, travel, city, hometown. These first-person stories are presented as remembering, descriptive, reporting and narrative. Using various contemporary autobiographical text excerpts and the use of writing portfolios, the topic of text types is taken up and encouraged to write with reference to one's own memory or biographical experience and cultural world. The aim of this study is to show how a creation of a portfolio can make a contribution or a stimulus to writing about one’s own life experiences on the basis of descriptive, reporting and narrative memory records. The three forms of writing such as reporting, description and narration have to be learnt and must be used consciously by students. The reading of autobiographical excerpts should inspire them to write biographically. Recognizing the special characteristics of these types of text, writing tasks were formulated. Through the portfolio work, the instruction and support of the writing process by the teacher, students got strengthened and encouraged in their technical act of biography-related writing. Based on the draft texts and the statements of the German teacher candidates on the writing portfolio, they succeeded in grasping the meaning of specific presentation methods and writing portfolios.