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German Reading S kills for Research

German Reading S kills for Research. Christine Bohlander , Researcher Development Officer Dr Alex Burdumy , Teaching Fellow for German. History of reading classes at Durham. Epiphany Term 2009 : History Department German pilot project for beginners & post-GCSE

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German Reading S kills for Research

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  1. German Reading Skills for Research Christine Bohlander, Researcher Development Officer Dr Alex Burdumy, Teaching Fellow for German

  2. History of reading classes at Durham • Epiphany Term 2009: History Department German pilot project for beginners & post-GCSE • Since Michaelmas Term 2009: university-wide provision of reading classes for all Postgraduate Researchers, first in German, then extended to French, later to other languages • Since Michaelmas Term 2010: MA credit-bearing reading skills modules in German and French for A&H at two levels

  3. Classes offered to PGRs9 weeks (1 term), 2 hours per week Different languages: Different levels (for German and French): - Beginners - Post-Beginners - Intermediate - Advanced - German - French - Spanish - Italian - Farsi - Arabic - Russian

  4. Who are the students? Diversity in • Mother tongue • Linguistic background • Subject area • Occasionally members of staff

  5. Target audience in German in Durham: 1) Theologians 2) Classicists 3) Historians 4) Archaeologists 5) Philosophers, law students, political scientists, musicologists, English literature students, etc.

  6. How to go about it?

  7. Course materials • Focus on grammar and sentence structure • What is already out there? • Shop around: which other universities offer reading classes? Oxford, Cambridge, etc. • Little pedagogic literature (out of fashion: the opposite of communicative approach) • Bespoke textbooks for reading academic texts and online resources about grammar

  8. Choice of textbooksome out of print, expensive

  9. Inductive, step-by-step grammar, practice with sentences, ideal for self-study

  10. Deductive, introduces chapters with texts, not easy to navigate

  11. Course Content • Vocabulary: • Dictionary skills and other strategies • Cognates / false friends • Grammar: • Steep learning curve (4 cases in one session) • Based on texts from the start • Consolidation for higher levels: • Based on authentic texts

  12. Pedagogical approach • Skills trained: comprehension skills, “decoding“ of structures, deductive skills, dictionary skills • a bit like teaching Latin • “Islands of knowledge“ rather than “islands of ignorance“ • Toolkit for decrypting German texts • No discipline-specific vocabulary • Identify difficult lexical items, conjugations and structures • “Werden, gehen, handeln, zwar…“, EAPs, reported speech, highly irregular verb forms, certain cases…

  13. Additional considerations • Doesn‘t foster intercultural communication • No production of language (not even pronunciation) • Meta-linguistic skills, students from different disciplines • classicists vs. physicists • Assessment (MA marking) must consider different components: • comprehension skills, grammar knowledge, ability to identify structures and grammatical items, progression, translation skills

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