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Considering that fairy tales have long been popular in second language (L2) education, we ask how these texts can remain applicable to our changing student body. In addition to their use in lower-level German classes for language and culture acquisition, fairy tales also provide a springboard into L2 literary interpretation for more advanced students, both at the secondary and postsecondary levels. The authors demonstrate that scaffolding and historical contextualization can enable students to engage in deep cultural and transcultural readings, public presentations, creative re-imaginings, as well as critical analyses. Examples come from two German programs at institutions with different educational goals--one focused on community-engagement, the other on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Both demonstrate how reading seminal tales through a variety of lenses can serve divergent learning goals. In one language program, they form the basis for community-engaged projects that connect learners to L2-speaking communities; in the other, they allow students to imagine social change by learning to recognize deep-seated inequities and critically examine how concepts of gender, race and ableism shape the spaces in which they live. The activities described are also applicable to other languages.

There is a need for a continued focus on language learning in advanced language classes beyond the foundations that are formed in the beginning and intermediate levels. Despite this need, little work exists on how to implement language-focused instruction in upper-level courses. As one possible solution, this paper outlines a functional, meaning-based approach to teaching language that could be easily adopted by all instructors, regardless of their professional training and/or research interests. As an example of this approach, the study described in this paper investigates the instruction of Subjunctive 1 through its function as indirect speech in a literary context. Eight participants in a fourth-semester German course engaged with the Subjunctive 1 form through a lesson focused on Kafka's authorial choices in the text "Vor dem Gesetz" that create a sense of uncertainty. This approach complements the traditional teaching of Subjunctive 1, such as in journalistic contexts, by centering it as a tool for meaning making in an author's lexicogrammatical toolkit. An analysis of pre/posttests that included both quantitative and qualitative data was used to assess the effectiveness of the approach. The results indicate an overall positive effect for the instruction but also individual variation by the learner. These findings support both the utility of and need for functional, meaning-based approaches in upper-level courses. Finally, I discuss how this type of approach could be adopted for any linguistic feature and by any instructor teaching advanced courses to support students' linguistic growth throughout the curriculum.

This mixed-method research study explores German skills using the NURS teaching model for students. It was conducted in the German educational department program at the Faculty of Language and Literature at Makassar State University. The research subject was 28 German academic students from two classes in the second semester. Research instruments in this study include syllabi, teaching plans, student activity sheets, and formative tests. Researchers use reading, listening, writing, and speaking tests to determine students' competencies and skills. The data was examined by researchers using percentage techniques. German Average score of the students before they learn using the NURS teaching model is 75. The result shows that the average student's German-language skills in the A class are 80.75 and 83.50 for the B class. These improvements could be seen in the improvement in each class. Students of A class have improved in listening, 7.5% in reading, 13% in writing, and 11.5% in speaking. Conversely, students of B class have improved by 12% in listening, 9% in reading, 18% in writing and 15% in speaking. Another value of using the NURS teaching model in learning German is that it positively effect on the teachers' skills, like management of teaching, time, and how to make students more enthusiastic during the learning process. It can be concluded that the NURS teaching model can improve students' German skills in the German educational department at the Faculty of Language and Literature of Makassar State University.

Language builds social and economic connections within countries as the most effective communication tool. It has the potential to introduce new opportunities and helps the speakers become world citizens. Although second language teaching focuses more on early education in many countries, it is still crucial for university students to acquire a foreign language. Second language acquisition enables institutional cooperation not just on a domestic but also on an international scale, thus contributing significantly to universal and contemporary growth. This research aims to determine university students' motivations for learning a foreign language, identify the problems during the process, and offer solutions. For this purpose, the opinions of the German Language and Literature department students studying at a state university on language learning were evaluated by taking the "Motivation Scale in Language Learning" and semi-structured interview forms. This study relies on a mixed research method combining the quantitative and the qualitative. The findings point out that students have a good motivation to learn a language, and the motivations are the same regardless of age, gender, grade level, previous educational background, and parents' educational background. According to the findings, students' motivations are living abroad, cultural growth, curiosity, interest, love, and new technologies. On the other hand, the lack of sufficient incentives, linguistic challenge, feelings of inadequacy, and prejudices affect their motivation negatively.

Given that societies across the globe are increasingly multicultural and multilingual, the notion of communicative competence grounded in constricting definitions of national cultures and languages reflects neither our instructional realities nor the sociolinguistic reality of the languages and cultures we teach. To foster students' development of second language (L2) competence grounded in an awareness of the symbolic construction of language and culture as well as "tolerance for ambiguity" (Kramsch, 2006), students must create with L2, rather than just reproduce what they have learned. After briefly outlining changing conceptions of language competency, this paper first describes how public uses of language and images through signs and graffiti make up a given place's linguistic landscape (LL), defines an evolving concept, and illustrates how it can be effectively used in L2 instruction. Then it highlights how a variety of LL-based activities help language learners become cognizant of their own sociolinguistic contexts and provides concrete examples from intermediate to advanced-level classes in two distinctly different German programs. The different approaches encourage students to combine LL-based activities with visual, literary, and film analysis to develop symbolic competencies that prepare them to negotiate unpredictable and diverse cultural norms.

The purpose of this study was to examine how literature study and study abroad, in combination as methods of internationalization, influence preservice teachers' (PSTs) intercultural competence and potential future classroom practices. Elementary education PSTs studied abroad in Germany for five weeks. As part of the preparation, they read a German novel identified as global literature. While abroad, they saw the corresponding movie and had conversations with German peers to better understand it within its cultural context. Three sources of data - My Cultural Awareness Profile, a Germany Questionnaire, and a Critical Blueprint novel reflection essay -- were analyzed. To better connect experiential learning abroad to future teaching, faculty guided PSTs to critically examine their pre- and post-responses. The findings indicate global literature is effective to begin to shift PSTs cultural perspectives. In combination, literature study and study abroad bring a global perspective to teacher preparation that can cultivate PSTs' intercultural competence.

The present article investigates foreign language teacher training quality enhancement by surveying pedagogical university students' opinions on important aspects of the course of Introduction to Germanic Linguistics within the Educational Programme for Bachelor's Degree in Education. The prime purpose is to study the perception of the above-mentioned optional course by Drohobych Ivan Franko State Pedagogical University (DIFSPU) students, with a focus on its content, organization and relevance to foreign language teacher training as well as on its professional competence formation efficiency. The complexity of the problems involved requires a combination of different methods, i.e. empirical, theoretical and statistical ones. 42 undergraduate DIFSPU students majoring in 014 "Secondary Education (English Language and Literature)" and 014 "Secondary Education (German Language and Literature)" took part in the experiment. The main survey tool was a questionnaire reflecting the parameters of assessing the course of Introduction to Germanic Linguistics. The data collected provides a solid basis for the revision of the course content, structure, organization, educational significance and efficiency, based on the direct participants' assessments and comments. The students' feedback reveals: 1) unanimous approval of the content and organizational principles of the discipline; 2) mixed opinions on its importance in the structure of the Educational Programme for Bachelor's Degree in Education; 3) variability of the course efficiency assessments. The data obtained allow for determining the conditions of an efficient implementation of Introduction to Germanic Linguistics into educational practice, such as prior familiarization of students with its aim and essence, emphasis on its applicability and optionality as well as its adaptation to the level and needs of future teachers. The data interpretation equally contributes to establishing the prospects of enhancing the course: 1) proportionalizing diverse types of educational activities; 2) increasing flexibility and variability in the educative process organization; 3) more efficiently interiorizing its content in terms of professional education priorities for future teachers of the English and German languages.

Writers and literature enjoy a prominent position in the culture and society of the German-speaking world. Today, German-speaking authors actively cultivate an online presence through publishers' websites, personal webpages, blogs, and online forums. In this way, the Internet has transformed the literary reading experience of yore into a four-skill media extravaganza. This engenders unrivaled access to the aural, textual, and visual environment in which literary texts reside, a multisensory world in which our students thrive. This essay proposes that audio and video files can fill the gap between how students read and how literature typically has been taught. By analyzing recordings of authors reading their work, performing their work, and being interviewed about their work available in online databases, radio podcasts, and video segments, students learn to access literary texts aurally. This expanded context can revitalize literature for the contemporary language classroom. Following a theoretical introduction about reading in the Digital Age, we present strategies for implementation in sample lesson plans. Our approach exemplifies how combining authorial voices with texts elevates reading to a multimedia experience that increases both listening and reading comprehension.

The present article focuses on studying metacommunication as a multi-dimensional self-reconfiguration endless symbolic process and its mechanisms of realising and optimising dynamic speech influence in German dialogue discourse within the anthropocentric framework of pragmalinguistics. Special emphasis has been laid on revealing the functional nature of metacommunication as phatic communication and as communication about communication, sustainably enhancing speech impact in a dialogue discourse environment. On the methodological basis of contextual, intentional, speech act and discursive implicature analyses the authors determine and define speech means that prove to be conducive to interlocutors' succeeding in speech acts as perlocutionary optimisers. The research material is represented by fragments of the dialogue discourse containing such tools of perlocutionary optimisation, collected by continuous sampling from German works of literature, where characters' speech is close to day-to-day conversational communication. The procedure of the given research comprised the analysis of discursive fragments in which the realisation of speech acts of various illocutionary types (potentially) results in communicative failures followed by studying metacommunicative utterances produced by the speaker to correct (or to prevent) the undesirable effects of his/her (potential) unsuccessful speech acts as perlocutionary optimisers. Realising the metacommunicative contactive speech act, they solve two blocks of tasks that contribute to the effective implementation of speech impact in the discourse: technically ensuring the uninterrupted flow of communication and additional intensifying the intended speech influence on the interlocutor, which is referred to as perlocutionary intensification. Based on this, the article offers a brief overview of the main technical tasks of perlocutionary optimisers, as well as a detailed analysis of the pragma-discursive features of perlocutionary intensifiers, namely: determining the way of their discursive realisation; distinguishing their pragmatic types depending on the object of influence; substantiating their position relative to other speech acts in verbal interaction, and describing the relevant situations of their functioning in the contemporary German dialogue discourse.

Following the definition of 'practice' conceptualised in "After Virtue," the paper argues that literature as creative writing and reading is a MacIntyrean practice. Literature's key internal goods are spelled out: the common aesthetic enjoyment achieved by the writer's ability to create a truthful fictional narrative the reader is drawn into "and" the expansion of our narrative identities and self-awareness. Against the conceptual background, the paper asks in which sense can we say that literature as a practice schools us in the virtues. Thomas Mann's work and life are discussed. It argues that Mann's work is both a rich source for us to understand 20th-century German and European bourgeois societies and an ideological obfuscation of such understanding. Drawing on his early conservatism, the paper shows how the practice of writing and Mann's Nietzschean self-assertion allowed him to become a politically engaged writer able to question himself and his culture.

Responding to Donato and Brooks's (2004) call for undergraduate students to have more opportunities to engage in discourse at the advanced proficiency level, collaborative dialogues provide students with a situation conducive to language production and learning (Swain, 1997). As most of the research on collaborative dialogues has focused on the accuracy of language in a classroom environment, this article explores the various ways learners work together collaboratively to make meaning while discussing course content in the target language in dialogues taking place outside of class. Four student dyads with mixed proficiency levels completed weekly collaborative dialogues in an advanced undergraduate German literature course, and the dialogues were analyzed for patterns in role-taking and resource usage with an emphasis on how the students negotiated the task to complete it and make meaning. The students stayed on task during the dialogues and assumed the collaborative, expert, novice, dominant, and passive roles described by Storch (2002) during their discussion. They also relied almost solely on each other as linguistic resources.

This article reports on the integration of leadership studies into upper-level foreign language literature classes in German and Spanish in two undergraduate programs--a military university (USAFA) and a civilian university (UNC Charlotte). Taking into account ACTFL's [American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages] 21st Century Skills Map (2011) that includes the goal of leadership and responsibility, the study describes strategies and texts for leadership integration and recommendations for implementation to broaden the curriculum. Instructors from both institutions noted the usefulness of this approach to support language programs that include leadership as course/program/institutional goals as well as stimulating cross-cultural analysis from their exploratory analysis of student responses in course materials (e.g. journal entries, essays, exam items) and explicit positive student feedback from civilian and military student populations.

Fairy tales often occupy only a superficial role in German language classrooms, used to check a culture box and teach the simple past tense. However, teaching fairy tales can engage students' analytical faculties and expose them to the culturally and linguistically embedded nature of folktales, leading them to a deeper appreciation of language, culture, and history. This article examines a course titled "Fairy Tales and German National Identity," and discusses ways to incorporate fairy tales into a course focused on German and intercultural literacy. Instructors can assist in developing students' critical thinking and writing abilities by highlighting the deep connections between language, culture, politics, and history as well as cross-cultural awareness. Students apply cross- and intercultural lenses to the study of excerpts from Goethe's "Das Märchen," a selection of Grimm tales (especially those that fall out of or were added to subsequent editions), Heine's "Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen," and other secondary and student-selected readings. Students learn to contextualize the tales within discreet German and contemporary political and historical frameworks through discussion, writing, and lectures. They may also adopt a new perspective on how high and low cultural artifacts influence social, cultural, and political attitudes.

This article describes strategies that the author employed to make a general education course titled "Fairy Tales and Folklore" more diverse and inclusive. Students read primary texts and secondary articles as part of ongoing debates, then form their own arguments within the debate, thus coming to understand how fairy tales are embedded within open and ongoing critical discussions about contemporary culture. Further, students analyze a classic work of Native American literature that, like the Grimm Brothers' "Kinder- und Hausmärchen," employs folklore within a project of cultural nationalism, but with very different implications due to systems of power and oppression that emerge at the intersection of folklore and colonization. Finally, students create new tales out of their own experiences. Through analysis of diverse texts, debate, and creative writing that emphasize the role of storytelling as resistance, the course described here takes first steps toward turning the fairy-tale classroom into a space of empowerment.

"Fairy Tales and the Transmission of Prejudice" is a unit in a lecture course on fairy tales that draws on research on anti-Semitism in 18th- and 19th-century German literature and culture, mapping questions raised in 18th- and 19th-century tales onto contemporary issues: The unit traces a trajectory from the Enlightenment to the present, and from Germany to the United States, analyzing a variety of texts, including Lessing's drama "Nathan the Wise" (1779), the three Grimms' tales about Jews -- "The Clear Sun Will Bring it to Light" (1815), "The Jew in Thorns" (1815), and "The Good Bargain" (1819) --, Spiegelman's graphic Holocaust narrative "Maus" (1980), and Sendak's illustrations for Wilhelm Grimm's "Dear Mili" (Grimm & Sendak, 1988). This article outlines the course, its background, and how the texts and their contexts are implemented in class. Throughout the course unit, the discussion of anti-Semitism in the fairy tales is broadened to one of prejudice in general. The article concludes with a brief discussion of student reactions to this unit.

In offering an account of teaching and performing Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje's "Verrücktes Blut" (2010) with advanced German students, this article reflects on the theme of cultural identity, particularly with regard to current issues related to migrant populations. As a play that showcases theater as a transitional space where linguistic and cultural identities may be negotiated, and where social and linguistic agency are interdependent, this particular play affords many rich learning opportunities for language students in today's global context. The play's ingenious staging devices -- formulated as a play within a play within a play -- provides an ideal opportunity for investigating the complexities and nuanced difficulties of ethnic identity and cultural expectations.

More than ever, faculty need to ensure that undergraduate curricula not only provide students with tools to gain linguistic proficiency but also teach them to analyze both written and visual information to attain historical literacy. Developing both intercultural proficiency and insights into various historical memorialization processes ensures that students can identify intertextual references, appreciate how their own culture memorializes its past, and understand how the past relates both to personal identity and collective identity formation. This article outlines how German programs might integrate historical inquiry into all levels of the curriculum and how language students learn to apply a cultural memory framework to the analysis of literature, film, and architecture from German-speaking countries. Since linguistic and cultural competence are linked, it also examines how to advance both through historic content, how to sequence activities, and how to engage learners more deeply. Ultimately, this article concludes that students develop an interest in history and advance their linguistic and cultural literacy through scaffolded, interdisciplinary, and relevant instruction.

German colonialism has long been treated as a sort of footnote in the epoch of the Empire due to its relatively short time span. The focus was mostly on the reconstruction of a story of 'white' men -- as the story of pioneers, 'discoverers', missionaries or traders. But how were children included in the colonial project? This article deals with this question with regard to the genre of colonial literature for children that emerged in the German Empire. Due to their pedagogic impetus these novels are of significance for historical educational research: they were explicitly put in the service of instruction to inspire children with the meaning of colonial issues. Within these novels 'nature' had high priority. On the basis of selected colonial novels for boys and girls, this article investigates the question of what was understood by 'nature' and of its importance for colonial education.

Italy opened the doors of its universities to female students in 1875. The general view was that very few women were clever enough to obtain a degree, so they would not threaten social stability. Female professors would be even rarer -- a few exceptional "male" women. Access to the professions was impossible in the case of the legal profession, or limited in terms of medicine. In this context, where both Catholics and Positivists opposed women's careers, seeing them as incompatible with motherhood and marriage, five women managed to enter the academic world as unsalaried lecturers: Giuseppina Cattani (1887, Pathology), Paolina Schiff (1891/1893, German literature and language), Rina Monti (1899, Anatomy and Comparative Physiology), Teresa Labriola (1901, Philosophy of Law) and Maria Montessori (1904, Anthropology). With archival documents and other contemporary texts, this paper reconstructs who these women were and the many difficulties they faced in academic life. Four of them were emancipationists and did not marry. These choices debarred them from pursuing a full academic career. Only Monti, who had a family and took no active part in female propaganda, managed to become a full professor in 1911, the first woman in Italy to do so.

In the interest of fostering a socially critical and inclusive German Studies, this article urges instructors to pursue curricular reforms to diversify and decolonize German curricula at colleges and universities. While the literary canon's centrality to the German major has tended to leave monolithic impressions of "Germany" and "Germanness" on students, and thus presents an obstacle to such efforts, the canon's function might be reconceived so that the "good" it has to offer can serve different pedagogical ends. Using a German program at a liberal arts college as an example, this article presents strategies -- from departmental and course learning goals to curricular structure and course design -- for how to decenter the canon in the German curriculum in order to foreground social justice concerns and facilitate encounters with diverse perspectives.

Purpose of this study is to examine burnout and teaching profession attitudes of teacher candidates. Research was conducted with 287 teacher candidates. By the findings; burnout and teaching profession attitudes of teacher candidates don't differ according to their gender. Burnout of teacher candidates differs according to their graduation status but teaching profession attitudes of teacher candidates don't differ according to their graduation status. Emotional exhaustion points of teacher candidates differ according to their field of study. Teacher candidates in art teaching have the highest emotional exhaustion mean ranks and teacher candidates in nursing have the lowest emotional exhaustion mean ranks. Lack of personal accomplishment points of teacher candidates differ according to their field of study. Teacher candidates in American culture and literature have the highest lack of personal accomplishment mean ranks and teacher candidates in Turkish teaching have the lowest lack of personal accomplishment mean ranks. Depersonalization points of teacher candidates differ according to their field of study. Teacher candidates in journalism have the highest lack of personal accomplishment mean ranks and teacher candidates in German language and literature have the lowest lack of personal accomplishment mean ranks. Teaching profession attitude points of teacher candidates differ according to their field of study. Teacher candidates in geography have the highest teaching profession attitude mean ranks and teacher candidates in journalism have the lowest teaching profession attitude mean ranks. Additionally, burnout of teacher candidates explains 9% of the total variance of their teaching profession attitude. Examining the results of the t-test, competence and depersonalization are seen to be the significant predictors of teacher candidates' teaching profession attitude.

This paper deals with the question of revolutionary literary texts. It examines the painful, or even brutal, measures that could be taken at times when the revolutionary figures depicted in the literary texts are themselves subject to control by a party line. While this paper shows that the noble intentions would not suffice for conducting revolutionary acts in Brecht, it also argues for the necessity of considering even tiny steps as positive historical contributions in Howard.

Where are German Studies heading? To answer this, a look backward into the development of German Studies might be useful. Starting with a brief overview, from the establishment of the first chair in 1776 to selected discussions of the curriculum of German Studies in English-speaking countries from the 19th century on, a number of -- at times contradictory -- developments can be detected. The content of the curriculum, the role of literature, the question of focusing on specific periods and writers, and methods of teaching the subject have never been static and continue to change. While some aspects are irrelevant nowadays, some questions about the relevance, focus, and identity of German Studies remain crucial and help our understanding of the shifting state of the discipline.

This article argues that vital resources for teaching the relationship of German and the global to advanced undergraduate language students can be found in a critical approach to the rich tradition of cosmopolitanism in canonical German-language texts. One especially rich vein of this tradition is the historical depiction of relationships between Europe and the "Orient" from the time of the Crusades, through modernity, and into intersections with the contemporary realities of migration, global capitalism, and multinational crises. A distinctive feature of the German tradition is the attempt not only to present and problematize the contrast between "Occident" and "Orient" but to explore -- even in literary texts -- theoretical approaches to cultural difference. These approaches retain their validity today as conversation partners as we develop our own strategies for navigating a world caught between competing visions of the "local," the "national," and the "global." By emphasizing the tension between the canon's complicity in constructing stereotypes and identities, which still haunt us today, and its advocacy for a utopian cosmopolitanism, students in these courses are prepared for both a critical appreciation of German-language traditions as well as a historically-based German perspective on current events.

Western Europe has been constructed in the field of education abroad as a "traditional" location: in some sense or another that label is used to suggest that it has a kind of static or dormant significance. In reality, Western Europe is an enormously rich location for study abroad precisely because it is a fluid learning environment that contains and sustains multiple meanings and ambiguities. It is a location that has been represented and constructed by American culture in some key ways over time and what is represented is simultaneously true and untrue. Within that paradox resides a great learning opportunity. This article explores some of the ways in which Europe has been created and recreated in the American mind and relates those constructs to the limitations, opportunities, and dynamics that may be explored in education abroad. Those constructs represent in part the baggage that students bring with them. In this article, the structure will recreate the experience of students coming to Europe. The essay explores the baggage they carry; engagement with the European environment, and, finally, the process of return. In that structure, which mirrors the experience of the study abroad student, a partial but suggestive set of perspectives emerge that go further than defending the traditional and, instead, present a cogent set of rich realities that collectively create the case for Europe. (Contains 35 endnotes.)

Recent debates about the future of academia have focused primarily on teaching the STEM subjects. This is certainly a valuable call for action, but it also threatens to ignore the significant contributions of the humanities and other fields. This article presents a workable alternative by way of looking at more technical writings by 18th-century German Jesuit missionaries in Sonora (today Mexico and Arizona), which invites a critical analysis of the data provided by those authors about the natural environment and the social conditions and also a thorough examination of "literary" texts at the same time from a humanistic perspective. Those narratives also serve as meaningful documents for all German students in the Southwest because they indicate the importance of the German language for the study of the local history going back almost two hundred years.

This paper frames the problem underlying the cross-cultural Organizing Curriculum Change (OCC) study of state-based curriculum-making. The paper discusses the increased use by states over the past two decades of the century-old instrument of the state-based curriculum and the tool of the curriculum commission. The paper contrasts the slender English-language writing on these institutions with the extensive German literature, with particular emphasis on the post-1970s German analysis and the revisionist analysis of the 1980s.

Units and classes dedicated to multiculturalism in Germany have predominantly focused on Turkish-German literature and culture. Afro-Germans have been a minority whose culture and literature have only marginally been included in German classes, even though Afro-Germans have been a part of Germany for centuries and have undergone efforts at establishing themselves as an organized cultural group. This article argues for a stronger focus on Afro-German culture in German classes by providing a brief overview of Afro-German history, outlining a sample class unit on Afro-German poetry, and introducing an extensive list of Afro-German texts and texts about Afro-Germans in Germany that can be used at different levels of German. The article offers relevant background information for instructors interested in including units on the Afro-German experience in their classes and suggests texts in a variety of genres for all language levels.

The aim of the current study is to investigate motion event cognition in second language learners in a higher education context. Based on recent findings that speakers of grammatical aspect languages like English attend less to the endpoint (goal) of events than do speakers of nonaspect languages like Swedish in a nonverbal categorization task involving working memory (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2013; Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2015), the current study asks whether native speakers of an aspect language start paying more attention to event endpoints when learning a nonaspect language. Native English and German (a nonaspect language) speakers, and English learners of L2 German, who were pursuing studies in German language and literature at an English university, were asked to match a target scene with intermediate degree of endpoint orientation with two alternate scenes with low and high degree of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that, compared to the native English speakers, the learners of German were more prone to base their similarity judgements on endpoint saliency, rather than ongoingness, primarily as a function of increasing L2 proficiency and year of university study. Further analyses revealed a nonlinear relationship between length of L2 exposure and categorization patterns, subserved by a progressive strengthening of the relationship between L2 proficiency and categorization as length of exposure increased. These findings present evidence that cognitive restructuring may occur through increasing experience with an L2, but also suggest that this relationship may be complex and unfold over a long period of time.

In the middle of eighteen century, sources of the East were considered by European visitors. Accordingly, Hafiz (c.1320-1329) was one of these sources that influenced one of the greatest poets and thinkers of German. Goethe severely in his "West-ostlicher Divan" disclosed that Hafiz's poems attracted him. In this essay, we explain influence of Hafiz on Goethe. In addition, the effect of love and aesthetic illustrated remove distances and keep nations and cultures closer in a common education in order to global unity as Hafiz and Goethe pointed it. Also, it investigates penetrating of globalization on international education, according to the Goethe and Hafiz's view.

One of the most popular Dutch educational enlightenment authors was Hieronymus van Alphen. His three volumes of "Little Poems for Children" published in 1778 and 1782 were extremely successful, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Inspired by the German poets Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann, Van Alphen brought about an expansion of educational space based on the integration of moral education in the spirit of the educational ideas of Locke, Rousseau and the Philanthropinists with poetical ideas and the nature of the child in both the content and the form of his poems. His poems were translated almost immediately into English, French and, surprisingly, as many of his poems were more or less adaptations of poems by Weisse and Burmann, into German too. Van Alphen's trump card was a reversal of former strategies of education: instead of pressing moral ideas upon the children from an adult point of view, he aimed at identification by (1) writing from the perspective of children, (2) situating the poems in the world of experience of children, (3) using a childlike style with a frolicking metre, rhyme scheme and prosody, and (4) combining text and images, so putting the moral message across visually and textually at the same time. In this paper, we follow the journey of poems for children as media for the cultural transmission of moral educational ideas from Germany to the Netherlands from the perspective of cultural transmission, moral literacy and educational space. We conclude that Van Alphen, with the combined power of text and image, successfully adopted and adapted former educational strategies, such as the moral poetics developed by his German predecessors Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann. Taking their strategies on a poetic journey from Germany to the Netherlands, he not only transferred them, but transformed them as well. Van Alphen did so in a specific Dutch utilitarian way. His poems could be read for fun but were intended for learning. They were useful and entertaining at the same time, because he took the life and living environment of children into account, and particularly accounted for the concept of development as a distinguishing characteristic of the specific nature of the child with which child readers could identify.

This article explores motivational changes of first-year students enrolled on German degree courses at two major UK universities. It reports on the qualitative data obtained by a longitudinal mixed-methods study, and focuses on the interplay between students' motivation and the higher education learning environment. In particular, the article aims to shed light on the significant decrease in intrinsic motivation experienced by students over the course of the first year. The qualitative data illustrate the importance of the right level of challenge for maintaining students' intrinsic motivation. It is suggested that there are three areas in which the level of challenge in the respective German degree courses may not be geared to students' needs: reading German literature, writing essays in German and grammar tuition. The article explores the reasons why students are struggling in these areas, and concludes by outlining pedagogical suggestions for how to counteract decreasing motivation during the first year at university.

This article is both an argument for and an example of portraiture, a methodology for conducting and presenting qualitative research which, though familiar to many social scientists and educational researchers, remains relatively unknown within the humanities. The author details one kind of practice within the scholarship of teaching and learning--a study of a transformational learning experience--that calls for the framework of the research portrait, and suggests further possibilities for this framework, particularly within area studies, cultural studies, and world languages and literatures. Numerous advantages of portraiture are demonstrated and discussed, including the de-marginalization of the research subject, the facilitation of interdisciplinary practice, and the further integration of the teacher-researcher's professional responsibilities and identities. (Contains 1 note.)

The increased use of electronic glosses to help students with reading in a foreign language has led to numerous studies of their effectiveness with elementary or intermediate students. However, advanced students in literature classes also need help, not only with literary interpretations, but with the kinds of language problems that glossing can ease. This study surveys existing tools for creating glosses and looks at possible alternatives to help students overcome language obstacles during bottom-up reading of literary texts. In the context of additional cognitive support for top-down literary analysis, it proposes a hybrid browser-based system, combining online dictionaries with easily prepared pop-up glosses. (Contains 9 figures.)

In this article, the author describes a series of projects that James Pusack and the author engaged in together, a number of them to develop CALL authoring tools. With their shared love of technology and dedication to language teaching and learning, they embarked on a long and immensely enjoyable career in CALL during which each project evolved into the next, forming a continuum of development activities that spanned three decades. James Pusack was a smart, funny, creative, entrepreneurial, optimistic, generous man. The author knew Jim for more than 30 years, and, starting in 1976, she collaborated with him professionally in CALL development. Jim came to Iowa in 1974 as an Instructor of German, specializing in 18th century literature. He was still finishing his dissertation, "German Monologic Fiction in the Eighteenth Century." However, shortly after he began his career at Iowa, the department assigned him the task of exploring computer-assisted instruction (CAI). It was then when they began to collaborate on software development.

Everyone will agree that education ought to prepare young people to lead a meaningful life, but there are different ways in which this notion can be understood. A religious interpretation has to be distinguished from the secular one on which this paper focuses. Meaningfulness in this non-religious sense is a necessary condition of a life of well-being, having to do with the nesting of one's reasons for action within increasingly pervasive structures of activity and attachment. Sometimes a life can seem meaningless when it is not so in fact. In more extreme cases it may in fact be to some extent meaningless. Equipping young people for a meaningful life is a worthwhile, but not all-important educational aim. Educators should help them not only to see their lives as meaningful but also to lead lives that are meaningful. This involves continuous engagement in the nesting of reasons mentioned above. Where autonomy is also an aim, temperamental attunement to possible options--rather than exposure to all possible options--and time to explore them are important considerations. Questions arise here both about social justice and about whether current school curriculum and timetabling arrangements help or hinder pupils in living a meaningful life. (Contains 2 notes.)

The following refections are little more than that: they represent the idiosyncratic experiences of a schoolroom novice in a German class, together with an attempt to view these experiences in light of published research and theoretical considerations. However, it would be surprising if the remarks below represent no more than an isolated case, without any echo among school language teachers in Australia. These refections of a beginner in the school classroom are concerned with how, and even if, grammar should be learned explicitly, and if so, to what purpose. After very many years teaching German language and literature in two Australian universities, I have in recent years been teaching the same two subjects in the International Baccalaureate program at an independent secondary school. German literature in the Baccalaureate course is taught only to native speakers of German at this school, thus there is scarcely any question of difficulties with language. The German language Baccalaureate course however is taught to non-native speaker learners in Years 11 and 12; such learners have typically taken a standard German course in the previous three years.

This article surmises the "position" and "ambition" of a nonnative speaker/teacher of a European language and literature as an ostensible facilitator of cultural difference in the U.S. foreign-language classroom. The paper opens a space to think through pedagogical conceptuality and the practice of assisting and guiding students in their perceptions of cultural difference in the specific situation when the instructor carries visible inscriptions of his/her "Otherness." Through an investigation of the adjectives "native?" and "non-native," the article critically reconsiders privileges of birth, affiliations through residence, education, and ethnicity. This article sutures two different streams of scholarship. First, by engaging with scholarship on German as a foreign language in the U.S., the article construes the "position" of the nonnative speaker vis-a-vis the native speaker/instructor. Next, through a discussion with cultural theorists, the article puts to test the "ambition" of the nonnative-minority as an allegedly reliable native informant of interculturality. (Contains 6 footnotes.)

This article examines the phenomenon of graphic novels generally, and in particular, their utility in second-language contexts via the example of the graphic adaptation of Klaus Kordoris "Der erste Fruhling." This text lends itself especially to bridging thematic gaps in 20th-century German literature courses, as well as the "language/literature divide," which is a current topic in language pedagogy. The article provides specific classroom techniques, in-class tasks, and writing assignments that will accommodate the varying student proficiency levels that often challenge instructors in second- and third-year college German courses.

The decreasing interest in the study of foreign languages forces us to reconsider and re-evaluate new teaching methods and approaches. Nevertheless, the use of music, in particular modern or pop music, for interdisciplinary studies and students' language skills appears to be still neglected. I claim that the lyrics and music of the popular group Rammstein deal with classical German literature and music and therefore should be added to the curriculum. Based on personal teaching experiences while teaching German for a couple of years at both high-school and university level I will provide insight into some aspects dealing with Rammstein in the classroom.

The current listing presents titles of doctoral dissertations related to the teaching of German and completed in U.S. universities during the "calendar" years 2003 and 2005. The term "related to the teaching of German" refers to dissertations completed in Germanics, comparative literature, linguistics, and foreign or second language education with reasonable applicability to German or to the teaching of German language, literature, linguistics, and/or culture.

This article presents several units from a course on German Humor offered at Washington University in St. Louis in the Spring of 2003 and 2006. The course was constructed according to the principles of the task-based classroom outlined by James Lee and employed at Georgetown University. The emphasis in each of the four units, which address East vs. West German Humor, Gender and Humor, the Americanization of German Humor and Ethnic Comedy, respectively, is on student investigation and interpretation rather than instructor lectures. The cultural sophistication required for the comprehension of humor is addressed via student presentation, comparison, and continued grammatical practice.

This report updates previous compilations published in this journal. The current listing contains references to 70 dissertations in German language and/or literature, comparative literature, and foreign or second language education with applicability to learning and teaching German.