“Teaching material must be formulated in a comprehensible way. Everyone agrees with this demand and yet the complaints about difficult texts never end.” This statement from Steffen-Peter Ballstaedt (1991, p. 19) is more than 30 years old but is still up-to-date: technically it is no major problem for most instructors to generate learning texts (i.e. texts provided to students as learning material) and to post them online. In view of the content, language and visual design, however, there are often uncertainties. For that reason, we would like to give you four basic recommendations for designing comprehensible learning texts as well as tips for their technical implementation.
