This article discusses the rich cultural resources embedded with German hip-hop music and its potential impact on the foreign language classroom. In particular, this article suggests methods and materials for integrating German hip-hop music in the discussion of recent controversial cultural events and attitudes in German after the "Wende."

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…

This article describes strategies specific to teaching German film courses at American universities, particularly how to capture the interest of students who have not studied film previously and have little understanding of German culture, history, or the language. I suggest starting with discussions on the interrelatedness of "foreign film" and…

The current listing presents titles of doctoral dissertations related to the teaching of German and completed in U.S. universities during the "calendar" years 2003 and 2005. The term "related to the teaching of German" refers to dissertations completed in Germanics, comparative literature, linguistics, and foreign or second language education with…

Providing students with lively, authentic comprehensible input is one of the most important tasks of introductory German teachers. Using a Tablet PC can enable teachers to improve the quality of the comprehensible input they provide their students. This article describes how integrating a Tablet PC into daily teaching processes allows classroom…

In this article, "Fragebogen" (1992) by Max Frisch is shown to contain appropriately challenging linguistic constructions for use in courses as a supplement to traditional anthologies in conversation/composition courses. Frisch's eleven questionnaires on topics ranging from "Heimat," marriage and private property to humor, money and death serve as…

"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…

This article describes an approach to working with foreign language texts in the classroom, "Stationenlernen," that takes the ongoing development of students' foreign language literacy as a goal. "Stationenlernen" is a pedagogical method common in German elementary schools and readily adapted to the foreign language classroom. In this…

Given the professed orientation toward proficiency development in the foreign language teaching profession, the inclination of textbook authors and publishers to offer communicative activities should be quite strong. This study analyzed the learning activities of six popular first-year college German textbooks and found that half the texts provide…

This paper reflects the work of the AATG Task Force on the Teaching of Culture, established in 2004. It seeks to define the issues and challenges related to the teaching and development of cultural competence in the German language classroom, including the lack of professional consensus regarding appropriate definitions of culture for classroom…

Connections between high school and college-level German programs can be strengthened through a combination of curricular articulation and strategic outreach initiatives. This essay reviews approaches to articulation, examines promising outreach models, and offers guidelines for developing program-specific plans. An analysis of German program…

This article discusses the benefits of hosting a German Immersion Day for area high school students on college campuses. Not only does an immersion experience benefit the students and teachers who participate, but it also serves to attract new students of German to the college and helps to create smoother articulation between high school and…

For our third semester of German, the bilingual novel "Mensch, be careful!" was the primary reading. Narrated alternately in German and English, this young adult "Krimi" enabled an authentic, substantial, and enjoyable reading experience. Guessing meaning from context was easier than in a monolinguistic text. Students' language learning awareness…

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…

This paper makes a usage-based contribution to the learning and teaching of German via the tools of contrastive learner corpus analysis (Granger, 1998; Granger, Hung, and Petch-Tyson, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2004). On the basis of an integrated learner and native speaker corpus of "telecollaborative" discourse (Belz, 2005), an empirically rich…