This paper is a study of a method for teaching German gender and plural assignment developed by the late Donald Steinmetz. My primary source for classroom material was the unpublished handbook for students that Steinmetz co-authored with Donald Nelson, The Joy of Gender: A Student Handbook made available to me by his son, Erik Steinmetz. In the…

Most educators are aware that some students utilize web-based machine translators for foreign language assignments, however, little research has been done to determine how and why students utilize these programs, or what the implications are for language learning and teaching. In this mixed-methods study we utilized surveys, a translation task,…

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,…

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 Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache": a large, representative, free and publicly available corpus of contemporary German texts. The article outlines specific theoretically…

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…

Culture has always been a part of foreign language learning. However, in recent years, more and more language professors advocate placing culture at the center of our classes. The question of just how to teach culture remains a topic of debate. This paper describes the reworking of a traditional German grammar and reading course into a class that…

Research has shown that English and German native speakers use prosodic cues during speech production to convey the intended meaning of an utterance. However, little is known about whether American L2 learners of German also use such cues during L2 production. The present study shows that inter-mediate-level L2 learners of German (English L1) use…

The MLA Report on "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" has been criticized for focusing its proposals on large German programs. This article attempts to show how some of its recommendations can also be implemented in smaller language programs. These programs exist within a network of relations to other…

This study of 134 college-level learners of German, enrolled in four years of instruction, showed them to "essentialize" German grammar when asked to describe it to a hypothetical friend. Kubota defined the term essentialization to capture learners' views of the target culture. Its main characteristic is the presupposition of "essential, stable,…

This article describes an undergraduate, German-language course that aimed to improve students' language skills, critical thinking, and declarative knowledge of German history and culture by studying multiple manifestations of the legend of Siegfried the Dragonslayer. The course used web-based e-learning tools to address two major learning…

Following a folk linguistic approach, this investigation of first-, second- and fourth-year learners' accounts of German found that (1) few had held pre-conceived notions about German prior to language study; (2) most pre-conceived notions concerned German pronunciation; (3) pre-conceived notions about vocabulary were most likely to influence the…

This study investigated students' motives for participating in a short-term study abroad program in Germany, their expectations about learning progress at the beginning of the program, and their perceived progress in various language skills at the end of the program. Findings indicated that students' expectations were higher than their perceived…

The present study reports the findings of an experiment on the effects of explicit information on the learning of German case markings. Fifty-nine learners of first- and second-year German received computer-based processing instruction on German accusative case marking and word order. These learners were divided into two groups: one received…

This article presents the results of a longitudinal study investigating the pronunciation of American students learning German, focusing on the importance of stress, rhythm, and intonation for a native-like accent in German. The present study investigated German pronunciation for two groups of American students from the Midwest. Students in one…

Auxiliary selection in L1 German is sensitive to the degree of transitivity of a clause. This study focuses on the most basic parameter of transitivity, number of participants, and shows that as students become more proficient in German, they are more accurate in auxiliary selection. First year students do not reflect in their writing that they…