The collegiate foreign language profession has become increasingly aware of the unnecessarily detrimental effects of bifurcated curricula on student learning and departmental governance, yet there have been few instances to date of departments that have been able to achieve unified, articulated programs of study. This article presents one foreign language department's initiatives and activities to do just that. We describe the collaborative process that the German Studies Department at Emory University underwent in its full-scale revision of the undergraduate curriculum. The chairperson begins the description by explaining his role in the reform process. Other faculty members continue the description by outlining the institutional and department context, the impetus for reform, the curriculum's theoretical framework, and the different curricular levels. An ongoing, multi-year project, the revised curriculum has placed demands on students and faculty but also indicated promise for enhanced departmental identity and student learning.

This article offers a critical examination of the current practices and beliefs about vocabulary teaching and learning in typical communicative-approach German classrooms. While research on vocabulary acquisition is scarce, frequency dictionaries reveal that current practice is based heavily on the use of concrete, referential lexemes that may be easier to teach but may not represent the most frequently occurring vocabulary in spoken and written texts. For teaching high-frequency vocabulary, which is often abstract and non-referential, this paper explores strategies for bilingual practice, validating the pedagogical use of the learners’ first language. These strategies integrate translation into the classroom as a productive strategy for learning that promotes learner autonomy. By discussing techniques for bilingual classroom practice for the acquisition of core vocabulary at the introductory and intermediate level, this article lends support to recent proposals for integrating translation and extensive reading as key strategies for developing vocabulary.

This study describes the design and implementation of a usage-based and corpus-based advanced German grammar course. Teaching materials for the course included DWDS, or Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache: a large, representative, free and publicly available corpus of contemporary German texts. The article outlines specific theoretically informed principles for course design and presents a logical progression of corpus-based grammar-teaching activities as used in this course. It also reports participants’ post-course reactions which were very positive. The article contains practical recommendations for educators interested in trying out corpus-based activities for teaching German grammar at different proficiency levels as well as to different participant groups. Furthermore, it promotes a more holistic perspective toward grammar as a meaning-making resource compatible with innovative approaches to grammar pedagogy.

This study examined how often and to what extent university learners of German use online resources (e.g., online dictionaries and translators) in relation to German coursework, their motivations for use, and their beliefs about online resources and language learning. Data for this study consisted of open-ended surveys (n=71) and face-to-face interviews (n=13) with students from second-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-semester language courses. Results from both the survey and interview data revealed that learners consistently used online resources, including online dictionaries, translation sites, and other websites for reasons related to time efficiency, vocabulary, to “check” or “compare” their work, and general reference. As to whether or not the use of online resources contributes to learning, learners had mixed beliefs regarding the advantages and disadvantages of using online resources.

This study explores the ways first-, second-, and third-year college students (n=352) perceived their likely attainment of 19 morpho-syntactic, phonological, pragmatic, and lexical features of German. Analyses further differentiated perceptions by the learner variables of year of enrollment, gender, achievement, motivation for language study, focus in class, experience with native speakers, and travel abroad. Results indicate experiential variables, particularly achievement and authentic experiences, to be of primary importance in shaping learners’ expectations. Grammatical features, especially nominal morphology, subjunctive, and passive were considered particularly difficult to attain, and more advanced learners were overall more optimistic than their less experienced peers. Learners’ belief in their eventual ability to use language in a socially appropriate manner was associated with actual or desired authentic experiences. The study concludes with a discussion of how learners’ imaginings of their future, more proficient selves can benefit from connections with a language-using community.

This article explores the possibilities for effecting Transformative Learning in students of German language and culture through the use of popular music videos, in both the target and the students’ own languages. Transformative Learning, a term that has differing valences in numerous academic disciplines, is employed here in its social-scientific context to denote the ability of learners to negotiate successfully between different cultural frames of reference in order to understand their experiences of cultural dissonance (Anderson & Cunningham, 2010). While Transformative Learning is indeed a higher order cognitive goal, the author argues here that the German language classroom can be an ideal location for building the skills (reflection, interpretation, acquisition of concepts and nuanced self understanding) that set the stage for Transformative Learning to take place over time. The author first lays the theoretical groundwork for this type of learning, followed by a brief introduction to the concept of transculturation (Pratt, 2005) as an important framework for understanding developments in German hip-hop musical and visual styles from the early 1990s to the present. The article includes an in-depth comparison of music videos from Germany and the United States.

This paper presents a study of factors affecting judgments of native and non-native accent in German. The data suggest that listener status (native or non-native speakers) and degree of experience with German play a role in the aspects of speech which raters cite as salient. Interestingly, the same descriptive terms used by raters were shown to mean different things for different raters, raising questions about the relationship between perceptions of accents and the ways people describe them, which, in turn, hold implications for language teaching.