Developing Writing

Reflecting the Department’s educational goal that students should acquire sophisticated multiple literacies through the study of German, the Department places great emphasis on students’ writing development, beginning with Level I and across all curricular levels.

Curricular and pedagogical documents that specifically focused on writing were developed over a number of semesters, beginning with the spring of 2000. After multiple revisions that benefited especially from work done in two of the teacher-researcher groups that collaborated under the Spencer Grant (2000-2002), the bulk of the work was completed and agreed upon at an all-department meeting at the end of the fall semester 2002.

This portion of our curricular web site provides a summary of that multi-semester work. It is organized into the following sections:

• Overview of writing-related principles and practices
• The special role of genre in content-oriented pedagogies
• Fostering writing development through task-based writing
• Writing development across the curricular levels
• Linking meaning and form: Language foci and weighting in writing tasks by Level

Level I; Level II; Level III, Level IV (Text in Context)

• Assessment and grading of writing performances
• Assessment of a particular writing performance
• Research on writing development in the GUGD

Visitors to the web page are invited to consult the individual sections for details. A number of these sections contain principles and/or curricular and pedagogical documents that have become central for departmental practice regarding the development of our students’ writing ability in German. There is also a published account (Heidi Byrnes, “The role of task and task-based assessment in a content-oriented collegiate foreign language curriculum,” Language Testing 19,2 (2002):419-437) that reflects an earlier phase of the department’s engagement with student writing.

December 7, 2002 (updated November 15, 2003); revised May 2011