Courses on the culture of the German-speaking world (GSW) have long dotted the landscape of undergraduate course offerings at North American colleges and universities. The primary purpose of this article is to share information about a new kind of undergraduate culture course that uses castles as a vehicle for introducing students to past and…

Fifteen years after the "peaceful revolutions" brought about the collapse of communism and the reunification of East and West Germany, a heated debate rages over the legacy of communism and the continuing impact of 1989. This paper describes a new course that explores the contentious issues in this debate through the innovative use of the course…

Our study of seven first-year college-level German textbooks surveys how these texts deal with the challenge of representing gender-inclusive language. Specifically, we look at gender marking in human nouns to see whether they occur as single-gender forms (e.g., "Student"), as morphological pairs in either full form (e.g., "Student/Studentin") or…

This article introduces drama pedagogy as an approach with great potential for foreign language acquisition, addressing students' multiple skills and facilitating their communicative and interactional competence. A strong emphasis is placed on social, emotional, and kinesthetic learning that is traditionally neglected in instructional settings.…

The article details a two-phase study investigating the relative contributions of talker-familiarity and talker-intelligibility to L2 listening comprehension by learners in a classroom setting. Students from beginning to low-intermediate German FL classes participated in German language listening tasks, being exposed to speech by their German…

Podcasts provide a straightforward opportunity to stay connected with language, culture, and recent events of German-speaking countries. Podcasts offer clearly articulated, authentic material that can be automatically and regularly delivered to your computer and classrooms; continuously exposing students and teachers to German. This article…

In this article, I review the options that teachers and students have to obtain German TV in the U.S.: through satellite and cable networks and by streaming, downloading, or recording TV programs through the internet. I also address how one can access TV programs over the air in the German-speaking countries by using a notebook PC and TV card.

In the context of teaching culture, this article presents teaching materials that provide learners of German with opportunities to reflect about, analyze, and practice, how Germans commonly react to compliments. Based on findings from conversation analysis, the materials provide students with rich contextual information and a variety of…

The essay recommends the incorporation of contemporary works in third-year courses at college level based on the redesign of two courses, "Advanced Conversation and Composition" and "GermanMedia." Curricular connections across the German studies major and focus on literacy skills can be enhanced through the systematic integration of recent…

This report of one program and one person highlights several successful initiatives that resulted in the growth of the German Program at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. While the ideas reflect common best practices of many successful programs seeking to maintain their profile in today's educational environment, the energy, commitment and…

The benefits of Language for Specific Purposes programs in engineering are well-known, but such programs are impractical for smaller universities and colleges. RISE (Research Internships in Science and Engineering) is a new opportunity for undergraduate students that allows smaller programs to appeal to engineering students and their professors to…

This article describes six games that instructors of German can use with students from the first year of high school or first semester of German through the fourth year of high school or fourth semester of college German and beyond. Unlike other games in which students must wait their turn to practice their language skills, these games engage the…

This article presents information about the history of the German language and makes pertinent suggestions for teaching German as a Foreign Language. The reasoning for such an approach is presented, along with supportive new empirical data and a related professional directive. A selected survey of historical, explanatory points from the literature…

Recent curricular discussions have addressed the linguistic, textual, and cultural knowledge that German Studies programs aim to impart. This article proposes that we focus not only on the knowledge that students are expected to gain but also on the development of student abilities to transform information into knowledge. It will explain the…

This article discusses a short-term study abroad program conducted in Berlin in English for college students. Guided by the academic goals of developing cultural competence, demonstrating cultural communication, and attaining a basic level of cultural literacy, this program, with its pre- and post-program academic components, offers an alternative…