German for Science and Technology: Teaching Strategies for Beginning Students

Abstract

In recent years, enrollment in German classes at American universities has fallen drastically. Excepted from this unfortunate trend, however, have been programs that are devoted to teaching languages for specific purposes (LSP), most prominently in the areas of business German and German for science and technology.' Many of these programs not only have received favorable attention from educational leaders because their efforts genuinely support the current trend to internationalize the curriculum,2 they have also been able to retain their enrollments or even to attract new groups of students into their language classes. The number of German majors at the University of Rhode Island, for example, has risen sharply in recent years, mostly due to the success of its International Engineering Program (IEP). In this five-year program students earn both a B.A. in German and a B.S. in Engineering. A sixmonth paid professional internship with a German-speaking engineering company is an essential component of the program, which also enables students to study for a semester at the Technische Universitat Braunschweig.3 In 1987, before the IEP program was instituted, the University of Rhode Island had six students majoring in German. Most German courses then were language courses at the elementary and intermediate level, offered to meet the two-year language training required for a degree in the College of Arts and Sciences. Since the beginning of the IEP program, the numbers of German majors at URI have increased exponentially; as of Fall 2000, 91 students major in German at URI, with approximately eighty of them enrolled in the dual degree program with the College of Engineering. It is interesting to note that the growth of the German program at URI is not limited to the International Engineering Program, but has also boosted the number of German majors. Since 1987, the number of liberal arts majors not concurrently enrolled in a professional degree program has almost doubled.4 Because of the increased enrollment, faculty at URI can now offer more German culture and literature courses at the upper levels than before. Rather than watering down the traditional liberal arts aspect of the German program-as critics of the program have feared-the success of the International Engineering Program has actually strengthened these