Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs

Melissa Etzler, Gabriele Maier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000286205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs explores recruitment, curricular design and student retention in modern language instruction by sharing best practices and a wide variety of pragmatic initiatives from teacher-scholars who have been involved in the successful building of German programs.

With German programs facing dwindling grant monies as students across the country shift from the liberal arts into career-oriented fields, it is paramount to promote German programs vigorously, to offer courses that reflect and compel students' interest, to keep students engaged in extracurricular activities and to establish a community of like-minded language learners.

The combination of curriculum-based strategies coupled with innovative projects, and extracurricular and outreach activities is intended to serve as a guideline for teachers and scholars alike who are in need of best practices they can use to boost enrollment and attract and retain more students.

1Reinvigorating a small undergraduate
German program through an integrated,
literacies-based curriculum

Jennifer Redmann

Every undergraduate German program in the United States today must grapple with issues of viability and vitality. College-level German enrollments decreased by 16% between 2009 and 2016, the MLA reported in 2019, and the total number of institutions offering German declined by 11%, more than any other language (Looney and Lusin 2019). Data on U.S. high school German enrollments is hard to come by, but The National K-16 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey Report released by the American Councils for International Education in 2017 indicates that only three percent of students enrolled in high-school language courses were studying German. As ever fewer students arrive at college with a background in German, faculty in German programs must find ways both to attract students at their institutions to the study of the language and to inspire them to continue with German courses beyond completion of a language requirement. The difficulty of this task is magnified by a pervasive shift in post-secondary enrollments away from the humanities toward STEM fields and professional programs. Even as a drive toward “internationalization” and the need to educate “global citizens” have found a central place in the discourse of higher education over the last decades, German programs across the country continue to face the threat of elimination. Those outside the field question the value of German programs when relatively few students choose to continue their study of the language beyond the elementary level, much less pursue a major.

Professionals in the field, of course, have been grappling with these issues for years. In 2007, the Modern Language Association’s Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages released its widely read report, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World,” in which the committee called on language departments to reassert the importance of languages and cultures in American education through a new focus on “translingual and transcultural competence” (237). If such a goal is to be achieved, the committee argued, language departments must develop new programs and approaches. In place of the “narrow model” of most post-secondary foreign language curricula (a two- or three-year language sequence, followed by a set of advanced courses focused on literary and cultural topics), post-secondary language programs should offer integrated courses of study that combine functional language learning with cultural and literary content at every level of the curriculum.

Despite the widespread dissemination of the MLA report, its recommendations have not been enacted on a wide scale. A survey of post-secondary language faculty conducted in 2016 revealed that, although 57% of respondents had read the MLA report and, on the whole, had a positive view of curricular integration, 45% of those surveyed had not made any curricular changes as a result (Lomicka and Lord 2018, 118). Thus it is clear that the “additive model” of the language curriculum, defined by Heidi Byrnes in her summary report from 1996 on the “Future of German in American Education” as “first mastery of the formal inventory of German, then content knowledge, then culture, then literature” (256), still holds sway in American foreign language programs.

In the pages that follow, I offer a case study in how curricular integration through a literacy-based approach can serve to reinvigorate German programs. As I outline below, the fully integrated, literacies-based German curriculum at Franklin & Marshall College, which has been fully in place since 2014, situates texts, along with level-appropriate tasks, at the center of every course at every level. By engaging with texts (even in the first year of German instruction), students sharpen their interpretive skills, become literate members of a German-speaking community on campus and beyond, and acquire a critical understanding of issues that have shaped German society of the past and present.

Curricular integration through a literacies-based approach

A literacies-based foreign language pedagogy offers an alternative to (or enhancement of) the communicative approach that has long dominated collegiate foreign language instruction in the United States. In a literacy-oriented curriculum, instructors focus not (only) on the development of students’ oral skills in functional contexts (such as ordering a meal in a restaurant or buying a train ticket) but, from the beginning of the curriculum, on students’ ability to make meaning in the target language “through the acts of interpreting and creating written, oral, visual, audiovisual, and digital texts” (Paesani et al. 2016, 23).

An appeal to the importance of texts begs the question of what we are trying to achieve in our undergraduate German curriculum. What knowledge, skills, and attitudes should graduating German minors and majors be able to demonstrate? For what purpose? These are challenging questions that faculty in every German program can and will answer differently. But in addition to defining the end point, we must also consider how those goals will be realized at each stage of the German curriculum. As Richard Kern explains, “curriculum can be thought of as a conceptual map of what students and teachers do over time, and the relationships among the various things they do. This conceptual map encodes decisions about what to teach (i.e. content), how to teach it (i.e. method and sequencing) and why (i.e. goals)” (2004, “Literacy and Advanced Foreign Language Learning,” 6). How will students become proficient in German? What should they know about the German-speaking world? How should they view themselves in relation to that world? And most importantly: How will our curriculum facilitate the achievement of these goals over time?

As one approach to answering these questions, I offer the concept of foreign language literacy as developed by Heidi Byrnes, Richard Kern, Janet Swaffar, Katherine Arens and others. In its focus on texts, foreign language literacy offers a means of unifying the curriculum while maintaining the centrality of the language itself.¹ A literacy-based foreign language curriculum does not distinguish between “skills” and “content” courses. Instead, working with texts becomes the central enterprise at every level, through pedagogical practices that extend far beyond basic reading and writing skills.

Literacy involves not only cognitive skills, which we associate with teaching students how to decode and encode words on the page, but also social and cultural practices and exchanges. As Richard Kern explains, literacy is about “relationships between readers, writers, texts, culture, and language learning. It is about the variable cognitive and social practices of taking and making textual meaning that provide students access to new communities outside the classroom, across geographical and historical boundaries” (2004, “Literacy and Advanced Foreign Language Learning,” 3). Understanding a text requires knowledge of genre conventions and the social, historical and cultural contexts from which it arose, and it is also subject to the individual interpretive position and creative power of the reader. Because literacy is not absolute but relative to contexts and communities, it is therefore helpful to think in terms of plural literacies (Kern and Schultz 2005, 383). Literacies are also closely linked to social identities, for in borrowing, adapting and using the target language, learners come to develop their own voices.

The initial application of this literacies-based theoretical framework to the American post-secondary German curriculum began at Georgetown University in the late 1990s. The faculty there set out to design an “integrated, task-based, content-oriented” German curriculum with the goal of fostering students’ “multiple literacies.” For those seeking to learn more about this work, the Georgetown University German Department website contains a wealth of background information, descriptions of the topics and goals of the various levels of the curriculum, and much more. What it doesn’t include, however, are the actual tasks and assignments that show us how Georgetown students of German engage with the assigned texts, although examples can be found in publications by current and former faculty members (see Byrnes and Kord 2002; Eigler 2001; Maxim 2005, “Articulating Foreign Language Writing”). This gap between the curricular framework and its classroom realization presents a challenge for faculty members who want to develop a literacies-based curriculum but are uncertain of how to design materials that will meet the needs of beginning and intermediate learners. In response to this lack of information, I will describe in the pages that follow how we have enacted a literacies-based curriculum at Franklin & Marshall College through our approaches to reading, writing and speaking about texts.²

Designing materials for an integrated, literacies-based German curriculum

In the German curriculum at Franklin & Marshall College, authentic texts – print, visual and audiovisual – take center stage in every course at every level. In choosing texts for first- and second-year German courses, we rely heavily on children’s and youth literature. Youth literature provides an opportunity for extended reading practice at a linguistic level appropriate for beginning and intermediate learners and, if chosen well, lays an excellent foundation for later engagement with literary and other types of sophisticated texts. Not only do students acquire reading strategies, but they can also draw on their native language cognitive abilities to begin to develop critical thinking skills in German through interpretation and analysis. Depending on the work at hand, youth novels can be rich sources of authentic historical, geographic and cultural information about the German-speaking world.³

The communicative textbooks used in most beginning German courses are designed to give students the tools to talk about themselves in German. In so doing, students often struggle to translate the terminology of their lives on American campuses (“Wie sagt man ‘sorority sister’ auf Deutsch?”), and because their discourse partners are other American students, it is hardly surprising that students often resist communicating in German, since English is admittedly more accurate and efficient. On the other hand, when language teachers place texts at the center of their curricula, they can transform classrooms from places where students mimic the contexts of authentic language use to places where students speak about the text before them, and together try to arrive at its various German-language meanings. In this way, a group of students becomes a discourse community, different from the one that the author of a literary work had in mind, but just as authentic. I would argue that the difficulties that students experience as “non-intended” readers of the text provide opportunities for cultural exploration that are far more meaningful than the “culture capsules” found in most textbooks.⁴

In the Franklin & Marshall College German curriculum, students read most of a 100-page youth novel at the end of the first year of instruction. In third- and fourth-semester German, they read two novels each semester that range in length from 50 to 175 pages. Although students in the second year do read some shorter texts in other genres, the emphasis placed on relatively simple, straightforward fictional narrative texts corresponds to learners’ limited, albeit expanding, linguistic and cultural knowledge of German. As members of the German faculty at Emory University explain in a discussion of a curricular restructuring project in their department, research into connections between text genres and language development supports a genre-based curricular sequence that moves from narration (at the beginning and intermediate levels) to explanation (at the upper-intermediate to advanced levels) to argumentation (at advanced levels) (Maxim et al. 2013, 6). Because the linguistic and thematic complexity of youth literature corresponds to the age of its target-culture intended readership, we can sequence works within the genre by choosing shorter books aimed at younger readers (8–11 years) for beginning German courses, while gradually moving to longer books for older readers (12–16 years) in the second year.

At Franklin & Marshall College, we have worked toward a vertically integrated German curriculum by choosing themes and texts for all levels. Yet, even more importantly, we have institutionalized a set of approaches to reading, writing and speaking that are designed to guide students step-by-step toward advanced proficiency. In terms of reading, this means that students work with a carefully designed reading journal in conjunction with every text at every level; in terms of writing, students complete model- and genre-based writing assignments for every level through the fourth year, where the focus is primarily on academic writing; and in terms of speaking, students acquire the linguistic tools to converse about texts in the classroom and to deliver formal oral presentations of increasing length and thematic complexity in every course at every level.

In the sections that follow, I will briefly describe these vertically articulated approaches to reading, writing and speaking. I should note that in designing these materials, Richard Kern’s book Literacy and Language Teaching (2000) has been a particularly valuable resource.⁵ Kern describes four curricular components outlined by the New London Group (1996) as a means of addressing students’ literacy needs. They are: 1) “situated practice,” which involves meaningful immersion in language use; 2) “overt instruction,” which helps students develop a meta-language for understanding the complexities of reading and writing foreign language texts; 3) “critical framing,” through which students learn to analyze and evaluate what they read and 4) “transformed practice,” which takes place when students learn to transform meaning into new representations (133). By attending to these four foundational principles in creating activities and materials for every German course in the curriculum, we can ensure that students move through an internally coherent curriculum toward advanced linguistic and cultural proficiency.

Approaches to reading

I first developed the format for a reading journal workbook, or Lesejournal, two decades ago when I was teaching my first literature classes and discovering that, even when students claimed to have read an assigned text, they were often unable to say anything about it. As we know, reading involves more than moving one’s eyes over the page, and many of the things we are able to do as a matter of course in our native language, like summarize orally the contents of what we read, must be consciously and repeatedly practiced when we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: When global citizenry does not include language learning: The challenges of foreign languages departments in the 21st century
• 1 Reinvigorating a small undergraduate German program through an integrated, literacies-based curriculum
• 2 Bringing global and local together: Program building through ACTFL’s “Community C”
• 3 Learning German in and for the 21st century
• 4 Diversity programming, student outreach and the politics of visible inclusivity for small German programs
• 5 Southern Illinois University Carbondale: One public university’s experience with international studies in the Midwest
• 6 Designing a language lab that encompasses cultural and interdisciplinary experiences
• 7 The courage to construct and experiment: Initiatives in updating the German minor program at Concordia University
• 8 Strategies for teaching 18th-century German texts in the context of program building
• 9 Technology-enhanced learning approaches to curriculum development: Architecture meets the humanities
• 10 Freundschaft, Motivationstraining und Märchen: Learning by living life in the GDR
• 11 Branching out with STEM in the German classroom
• 12 The Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik: A model and asset to small German programs
• Conclusion: The future is now: Saving German studies in a bravenew world
• Index