Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German最新文献

{"title":"Productivity and creativity triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and new technologies","authors":"Albrecht Classen","doi":"10.1111/tger.12223","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12223","url":null,"abstract":"THE ESSENCE OF THE HUMANITIES One of the key components determining the entire field of the humanities consists of teaching critical thinking expressed orally and in writing. [...]whatever literary works or languages we work with, ultimately the purpose proves to be to lay the foundation for cultural competence, linguistic skills, research abilities, and writing skills for a constantly changing world. The exchange via online writing thus proved to be a highly innovative method of studying, demanding a high level of concentration and involvement from the professor and the students. Since we emphasize in the humanities in general and in German studies in particular writing skills, this method was successful. Teaching a literature course in German at an upper level via such a chat room proved to be challenging at first, but then it was highly productive because of the intensive writing activities by students and the instructor. Top Hat is also highly useful for taking attendance (once, twice, or three times per class), for quizzes, and for multiple-choice exams. Since questions can be posted so easily online-also during class meetings-students can also be encouraged to get involved in the teaching process themselves by formulating discussion questions for the entire class.","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 1","pages":"41-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48303919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(Re‐)Discoveries in a Time of Disruption","authors":"Karin Baumgartner, M. Schulze","doi":"10.1111/tger.1111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.1111","url":null,"abstract":"Since Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German is the society journal of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), these discussion topics arose and will arise from important discourses in the Association. Disruptions pose a challenge for teachers of German at all levels of education, personally and professionally. [...]the set of 21 short articles in this issue is intended to help us as a community to give meaning to current challenges and to share what we have learned. Martina Caspari (\"Ganz entspannt im Hier und Jetzt: Fostering Social Presence in Communicative Language Instruction\") went back to the natural approach and total physical response, which were popular in the 1980s. Heidi Denzel and Nicolay Ostrau write in \"Responding to the Mental Health Crisis among our Language-Learning Community\" that it is possible, and necessary, to develop an approach that integrates wellness and universal design.","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44454687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ganz entspannt im hier und jetzt: Fostering social presence in communicative language instruction—Before, during, and after the pandemic","authors":"Martina Caspari","doi":"10.1111/tger.12245","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12245","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This Forum contribution reflects on the new experience of the lack of human contact and interaction in a common space of physical closeness, and how this has affected language learning-and-teaching. Language instruction as a social event (Fahim & Haghani, <span>2012</span>, p. 693) and as a humanistic endeavor in the here and now, which requires students to be present and interactive in the classroom, has been my teaching philosophy, which I followed ever since I was trained in applying the Natural Approach (Krashen & Terrell, <span>1988</span>) in the early 1990s at UCLA. It is a method of language learning which aims at a classroom fostering language acquisition through meaningful input, and, consequently, output. To achieve this aim, social presence is a must as a low affective filter supports language acquisition, enabling a fear-free environment in which social exchange is key. The classroom time is mainly dedicated to input activities (listening, including being read to) and interaction (speaking), whereas the time outside of the classroom is dedicated to reading and writing. Classroom activities are affective-humanistic activities (such as dialogs, interviews, preference ranking, personal charts and tables, and revealing information about yourself) and activities using the imagination and the body, including total physical response (TPR) (Krashen & Terrell, <span>1988</span>, p. 109), which is a method developed by Asher (<span>1969</span>). In the TPR classroom, the students are asked to move in the space according to the instructions of the teacher. They can act out movements, mental or emotional states, and everyday activities or become pantomimes acting out entire stories with their bodies. Of course, this might be more difficult in online instruction, but the student does not always have to be in front of the computer. They can just use the space of their room and follow the instructions of the teacher.</p><p>I think of my classroom as a blended-learning space making use of readily available “roughly tuned input” (Krashen & Terrell, <span>1988</span>, p. 33) of the second language (L2) from many online resources. However, “finely tuned input” (p. 33) still needs to be generated by the instructor in face-to-face instruction as well as in online teaching according to the needs of the group most of the time. That is why all activities presented here are centered around finely tuned input and help language acquisition through repetition (high-frequency input), recycling of words, and range (a great variety of input in different contexts), to name just some input techniques (Caspari, <span>2019</span>). The concept of social presence “the degree to which a person is perceived as ‘real’ in mediated communication” is an essential indicator of success in online teaching (Cobb, <span>2009</span>, p. 241). The activities suggested here target relationship, community building, and awareness of and contact with one's own (physi","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 1","pages":"17-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/tger.12245","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46941506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Effects of extended exposure to video in the language classroom on listening proficiency","authors":"Theresa Schenker,&nbsp;Lieselotte Sippel","doi":"10.1111/tger.12220","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12220","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Research has shown that world language learners’ listening comprehension skills develop at a slower pace than reading or speaking skills, possibly because a systematic approach to developing listening skills is often neglected in classroom contexts. To address this issue, the present study investigated whether listening skills can be improved through targeted practice. Thirty-three learners of a third-semester German course were assigned to either an experimental group (<i>n</i> = 22) or a control group (<i>n</i> = 11). Over the course of one semester, the experimental group watched short episodes of a German web-based telenovela designed for language learners and completed vocabulary exercises and comprehension questions. Listening skills were assessed through the DIALANG test and a self-assessment at the beginning and at the end of the semester. Results showed that only learners in the experimental group made significant gains in listening proficiency. Both groups increased their self-rated listening proficiency. Overall, the results suggest that using a telenovela for targeted listening practice is a useful way to help learners develop their listening skills.</p>","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 2","pages":"118-130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44903974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching resilience in fragile times","authors":"Penelope Kolovou","doi":"10.1111/tger.12247","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12247","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The outbreak of the pandemic, followed by harsh lockdowns, found me at a new work position as the coordinator of the Latin courses as part of the General Education at the University of Bonn. Without any specific template handy, all courses had to be reorganized to go online, depending merely on the experience and disposal of each lecturer. Afterward, I had plenty of time to observe the effects of mainly asynchronous teaching on both an immense number of students and their teachers. In a survey I ran for personal research purposes at the end of that first COVID-19 semester, the following points became clear: Students expect individual feedback, constructive interaction, and engaging content. The students’ responses were in many cases a direct plea for communication and socialization with their peers and teachers. At that point, I recalled Michel Serres’ &lt;i&gt;Thumbelina&lt;/i&gt;, wittily translated into German as a “love confession to the networked generation.” In his work, the French philosopher discusses the necessity of considering the fact that transition to e-learning is also a matter of education policy rather than a matter of technological advance, because we need to educate our students to act in a new space of open, inventive thought, to match not only the transformation of technologies but rather the forms of knowledge and social organization they need to manage (Serres, &lt;span&gt;2012, 2014&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A few months later and parallel to my coordination tasks at the University of Bonn, I started in a new role as a lecturer in German of intensive language courses for international students at the University of Bielefeld. Of course, our students were residing in their home-countries (e.g., Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Australia, Greece, and France) at that time. So, one of our main concerns was to bring as much authentic input (e.g., original texts, videos recorded in our university building and on campus) as possible into the course. In the case of our German courses, interaction was in balance with asynchronous learning activities, following a flipped-classroom model which proved to be effective and fun for both students and lecturers, based on their feedback on instructional sequences and their exam results. However, although my students looked satisfied in class in September 2020, I observed how this started to gradually change in the subsequent courses. A reasonable explanation maybe the fact that virtual interaction was no longer the exception but rather had become the norm. Thus, the initial fun started to abate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;After the first lockdown, evaluations run at the University College of Teacher Education Lower Austria (PH Niederösterreich) regarding distance learning from the point of view both of teachers and students showed comparable evidence: On one hand, the workload of the courses was rated as appropriate and the frequency of the occasions for self-reflection as quite fair. On the other hand, although the statements on co","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 1","pages":"25-29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/tger.12247","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46399008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pivoting to a virtual high school exchange: The GAVE program","authors":"Alysha Holmquist","doi":"10.1111/tger.12242","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12242","url":null,"abstract":"The U.S. Department of State recognizes that students \"act as citizen ambassadors by building relationships within their host communities, demonstrating American values, and debunking stereotypes\" (U.S. Department of State, 2023). According to the GAPP website, over 750 high schools in the United States have a GAPP program and more than 9000 students participate in GAPP each year. Afterwards, the students filled out an evaluation of GAVE, provided on the GAVE website. Ludwig confirms that \"online classes cannot replace the classical purpose of a stay abroad, namely: to be in a different place, in a different environment, to gain hands-on experience and, last but not least, to become more independent\" (Ludwig, 2022).","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 1","pages":"49-52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42561420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deutsch lernen an Serbiens Schulen: Herausforderung für die Motivation – pädagogische Implikationen","authors":"Marija Stanojevic Veselinovic","doi":"10.1111/tger.12238","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12238","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 1","pages":"85-88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42079700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Growth despite (major) disruption: Curricular innovations in a small German program","authors":"Melissa Elliot","doi":"10.1111/tger.12234","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12234","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 1","pages":"73-75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47229586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A cold war text for the COVID generation","authors":"Alyssa Howards","doi":"10.1111/tger.12236","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12236","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;As the last question to the final exam for my German literature in translation course about a decade ago, I threw my students a softball: “Which book was your favorite, and why?” The answers, as I expected, varied. What I did not expect was that out of nearly 20 students in this General humanities course, not one listed Marlen Haushofer's Austrian novel &lt;i&gt;Die Wand&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;i&gt;The Wall&lt;/i&gt;, 1963, subsequently referred to in English because class taught in translation). This silent censure was surprising. I had in part assigned the bestseller because I was confident that students would be gripped by its shocking turn of events: the dystopian pseudo-memoir chronicles the daily routines of a woman who, during a weekend vacation in the foothills of the Alps, suddenly finds herself alone and isolated from the rest of the world by a massive, invisible, and insurmountable wall. The author never reveals the specific cataclysmic event that precipitated the wall but given the tense geopolitical climate in which it was written, most readers have assumed some kind of nuclear disaster from which the narrator has been spared (but who built it? and when?). What follows is a Robinson Crusoe-esque chronicle describing how the protagonist fills her days, days of inescapable social distancing that seem to blend together into cycles of food gathering and speculation about an uncertain future.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;After &lt;i&gt;The Wall&lt;/i&gt; failed that final exam, I felt compelled to remove it from my reading list: students simply could not relate to the novel's odd mixture of personal and social trauma along with the quotidian tasks of harvesting, cooking, and other domestic chores. The book, they collectively lamented, was about housekeeping. Blissfully unaware of how mundane daily routines can help us maintain the illusion of order and control in the midst of catastrophe, most of my students, who tend to come from comfortable backgrounds, could not imagine themselves into anything resembling the narrator's circumstance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;COVID-19 has given the novel renewed relevance. Not only do the early pandemic fads of sourdough baking and mushroom foraging make the narrator's frontier-style life now seem less removed from reality, the loneliness, uncertainty, and subdued terror that form the backdrop of her daily routine perhaps for the first time will be relatable to students. Certainly, the fears of the nuclear age—and indeed of any geopolitical or viral cataclysm—pose the same threats to our most basic livelihood, peeling away as unessential our layers of humanity and at worst, leaving us mere organisms seeking our next meal. The novel's fixation on mundane household tasks, steeped in unease, alienation, and accompanied by hints that the entire cataclysm likely was caused by human hands, create an unsettling combination of banality and terror—a word pair that also describes life under a pandemic lockdown.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At first glance, the novel reads like a survival handbook, emotionally austere","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 1","pages":"14-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/tger.12236","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43033926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"DaF, COVID-19, and newer technologies: Experiences from an Indian University","authors":"Abhimanyu Sharma","doi":"10.1111/tger.12241","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tger.12241","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Around late 2019 to early 2020, the world was first hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The imposed lockdowns created newer challenges for the education sector, as they led to a temporary suspension of physical classes and forced both teachers and students to switch, at short notice, to online teaching. In this paper, I discuss the impact of the pandemic on foreign language learning (FLL) in India and examine the strategies employed by teachers to address the challenges posed by the lack of physical classes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;FLL is a specialized form of learning because of its reliance on learner participation. Certain FLL methods such as “embodied learning” consider the impact of bodily movements in the learning process (Kosmas, &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;). In their research on FLL for preschool children, Toumpaniari et al. (&lt;span&gt;2015&lt;/span&gt;) noted that physical activity involving gross motor activities can lead to better cognitive functioning and higher academic achievement scores. They also observe that research within the theoretical framework of embodied cognition has shown that embodying knowledge using more subtle motor activities, such as task-relevant gestures, has a positive effect on learning (Toumpaniari et al., &lt;span&gt;2015&lt;/span&gt;). Research on FLL for adult learners shows that they pay more attention to the teacher's verbal explanation when embodied actions are used (Matsumoto, &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The pandemic created a situation in which learning with embodied action was not possible. Klimova (&lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;: 1793) notes that online teaching fails to offer a “strong teaching presence, which is a catalyst for the development of social and cognitive presence and a key component of traditional professional training.” She notes further that whilst students find online language classes effective, “face-to-face classes cannot be replaced” (Klimova, &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;: 1793). In this paper, I outline the methods I employed to compensate for the multisensory approach of embodied learning and examine to what extent online teaching can serve as an alternative to physical classes with respect to FLL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The data presented here is based on my DaF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache—German as a foreign language) teaching during the first lockdown period in India (March–May 2020). The data was collected at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (henceforth JNU), a premier state university based in New Delhi. In April 2020, JNU opted for online classes and extended the semester by 1 month to compensate for the time lost, so the data collected for this paper is from the period April to June 2020. The students I taught were intermediate learners of German: At the time of collection of data, they were in the second year of their BA program in German Studies and had done 1 year of German starting from ab-initio level in their first year. It is expected that the language proficiency of BA-2 students is at the B1 level. However, this was not entirely the case: out of the 32 student","PeriodicalId":43693,"journal":{"name":"Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German","volume":"56 1","pages":"63-67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/tger.12241","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43034181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}