Goals

The curriculum aims to enable students to become competent and culturally literate users of German by combining a focus on content with carefully conceived pedagogical interventions that reflect the best available knowledge in classroom-based second language acquisition research.

Students gain a rich understanding of the German-speaking world through a variety of content areas and their topical emphases and range of texts, through the medium of the German language itself, and through a process of learning German that attends to accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language use and development. They will critically explore their own assumptions in terms of that world, and learn to value the multiple perspectives learning German and engaging the German language opens up. In short, the curriculum is conceptualized to allow learners to become competent and literate non-native users of German who can employ the language in a range of intellectual and professional contexts and who can also draw from it personal enrichment and enjoyment.

May 16, 1999; revised July 2011