GRMN 200: Intermediate German I
Prerequisites: German 100 or the equivalent
Credit Hours: (4)
Balanced emphasis on listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This course has been approved for credit in the Foreign Languages Area of the Core Curriculum.
Description of Content of Course
Situations covered include: living accommodations, the city, looking for an apartment, household chores, geography, means of transportation, the car, travels, childhood, youth, telling stories and fairy tales, dining, household appliances, shopping and cooking, asking for directions, clothes and appearance, illness and personal hygiene, going to the doctor and to the hospital, accidents, relationships, multi-cultural society, what the future holds, and animals.
Cultural sections focus on: writers, artists, scientists, regional living styles, architecture, legends, traveling, Austria, the youth culture, the eating culture, fashion, relationships, multi-culturalism in Germany, and pets.
Grammatical structures include: comparing adjectives and adverbs, two-way prepositions, word order, separable-prefix verbs, dative prepositions, relative clauses, the superlative of adjectives and adverbs, referring to and asking about things (da- and wo-compounds), the perfect tense (a review), conjunctions, the preterite tense, narration in the past, adjectives and their endings, adjectives with the dative case, the polite subjunctive forms of modals, indirect questions, possibility, dative verbs, reflexive pronouns, and the imperative (a review).
Detailed Description of Conduct of Course
Class instruction targets communication practice utilizing the situations, intentions, vocabulary, culture and grammar introduced in a given chapter. Other activities include: grammar and vocabulary explanations, pronunciation practice, listening comprehension exercises, writing, and grammatical drills. Class is conducted primarily in the target language.
Goals and Objectives of the Course
Speaking and listening goals (standardized ACTFL proficiency criteria): Students will be able to speak the critical language by relying heavily on learned utterances but occasionally expanding these through simple recombinations of their elements. Students can ask questions or make statements involving learned material. There will be some spontaneity, but speech will continue to consist primarily of learned utterances. Students will be able to pronounce nearly all German sounds accurately when uttered in isolation and a growing number even in rapid speech. As regards listening skills, students will be able to understand short, learned utterances and some sentence-length utterances, particularly where context strongly supports understanding and speech is clearly audible.
Reading and writing goals (standardized ACTFL proficiency criteria): Students will be able to identify an increasing amount of learned material without assistance and to understand a limited amount of new material when supported by context or dictionary assistance. In writing, students will be able to reproduce a variety of learned phrases and some basic sentences by recombining learned material.
Students will achieve a degree of competence in a foreign language and culture.
Students will be able to:
a. demonstrate language skills appropriate to the level of study
b. analyze similarities and differences between their own and the target cultures
c. explain contemporary international issues from the perspectives of their own and the target cultures
Assessment Measures
Speaking progress is evaluated in class and in oral interviews. Written homework assignments provide a basis for the evaluation of writing progress. Listening and reading comprehension and grammatical accuracy are tested in quizzes, chapter tests, and on the final exam. In most of these testing situations, students will also either demonstrate or further expand (in the case of new linguistic excerpts containing new cultural topics) their familiarity with cultural topics and current global issues. Students success in using German will therefore demonstrate not only their linguistic abilities but also their cultural competence to anticipate, identify, and to simulate the use of different cultural perceptions and behaviors through the new language.
Other Course Information
German 200 is a continuation of German 100 and targets language learners with either German 100 or the equivalent, e.g. one or two years in high school. To supplement linguistic and cultural encounters in class, students are expected to participate in some extracurricular activities such as conversation with native speakers, watching German language movies, and inquiring about German-speaking cultures by means of the multitude of media available as informational resources.
Approval and Subsequent Reviews
September 2005 Reviewed Philip Sweet