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…

Many students enroll in language classes with the instrumentally motivated goal of satisfying a requirement. This article argues that instructors can influence students' motivation toward more integrative motivation by helping them make connections with the language community. The "Language Partner" program established for a small…

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…

Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) is a method that requires students to work in small groups, view models or diagrams, and answer carefully designed questions that guide them to an understanding of the subject matter on their own, with minimal direction from the instructor. Several studies show that the method has been highly…

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,…

Content-based instruction (CBI) has been part of the foreign language curriculum for many years at US colleges, leading to courses that combine language instruction with specific content domains, such as film, literature, politics, sports and many others. This article presents a rather unusual choice of content domain for a second-year language…

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 article describes a four-week service learning abroad program. Students from a U.S. university assist and teach in elementary school English classes for one month in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany while living with their German partner teachers. The program description and students' feedback illustrate that this program provides students with 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…

Based on findings from a recent study investigating how a group of undergraduate students defined, experienced, and perceived self-identified cultural encounters during a five-week stay in Mayen, Germany, this article suggests that short-term language and culture study abroad programs are fertile venues for exploring culture learning. After…

Teaching culture in the foreign language (L2) classroom can be a real dilemma for instructors: What culture do we teach? What does it mean to learn about a culture? How can students learn culture? In order to answer these questions, we evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of two types of culture portfolios: a traditional one that used on-line…

"Extensive" reading has been discussed in the recent research literature as a viable, indeed preferable, means of helping learners develop fluid, more native-like reading skills in a foreign language. But extensive reading texts, in order to be comprehensible at the beginning/intermediate level, are either "diluted" authentic texts, or…

Despite common assumptions of foreign-language culture as a tool in student recruitment and retention, students are not universally convinced of either the teachability of culture or the appropriateness of teaching culture at all levels of language instruction. This paper shows that students' definitions of foreign-language culture differ…