Workshop on Selecting and Sequencing Texts for Content- and Language-based Curriculum

German Department Professor Marianna Pankova hosted a workshop on selecting and sequencing texts for foreign language (FL) curriculum. The Georgetown University German Department (GUGD) undergraduate curriculum is one of the few programs that conceptualized and implemented an approach based on reform in FL education–grounded in the exploration of content, cultural practices, and multicultural perspectives, the literacy-oriented GUGD´s curriculum is organized around texts that function as curricular-building blocks for fostering language and content learning. The workshop addressed questions such as, “What defining criteria would one use when selecting and categorizing the texts? And how can these texts be sequenced on a continuum from simpler to more complex in order to foster literacy development as expansion of one’s ability to make meaning in a FL?”

Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) and genre theory (Coffin, 2006; Martin, 2009), this workshop laid out key theoretical principles for text categorization and sequencing. Going beyond the consideration of complexity of language forms, the suggested framework approaches progression in texts from three interrelated perspectives: the situational and cultural context of textual production, the discourse-semantic realization of contextual goals, and the lexicogrammatical construal of these contextually-bound meanings. Workshop participants were able to improve their understanding of the curricular principles that underlie the program as they applied them to the analysis of three increasingly complex texts.