Designing a Third-Year German Course for a Content-Oriented, Task-Based Curriculum

Teaching Advanced German has long been recognized as presenting particular challenges. In most collegiate programs, the third-year language courses are the last sequenced courses students take before enrolling in upper-level literature and culture. And here we face a dilemma: even in the fourth year, most students require extensive practice in all aspects of language use to push them beyond intermediate level fluency, accuracy, and complexity in both the receptive and the productive modalities. As a literary scholar who regularly teaches both language and literature, I am acutely aware of the gap between what we would like to do in the so-called content-courses and what we actually prepare students to do in third-year language courses (see also Weber 50; Mittmann 482-83). The main problem is not that the materials in these content-courses are more demanding, but that the linguistic basis for the critical and interpretive capabilities we want students to develop is largely absent. This lack frustrates students and instructors alike and often results either in discourse shifts from the critical to the personal realm or in discussions in English.1 One solution to these challenges has been to introduce the course, which focuses on content while attempting to move from the sentence to the discourse level. These bridge courses are a step in the right direction, but problems persist (see also Gutschke). There is not always sufficient thought given to where learners stand and what we can do to move them further, that is, how to attend appropriately to language forms on the sentence and discourse levels in a content-driven course. Furthermor , many of these bridge-courses are developed in language programs that otherwise remain un-changed, that is, there is a lack of articulation of over ll instructional goals pertaining to FL Acquisition on the preceding and subsequent course levels.2 In response to these challenges, the German department at Georgetown University revamped its entire undergraduate curriculum over three