Learning German One-on-One through Guided Independent Study

Abstract

Situation: your department is small; your first-year courses are always full, but more advanced courses have marginal enrollments. The dean says that you can offer only a very limited number of lowenrollment advanced courses. The only way you can justify offering more courses is to increase enrollments, but students complain that reason they don't enroll is lack of variety and choice: Catch-22. How do you escape from this vicious circle? The situation described occurs, unfortunately, with increasing frequency. enrollments have been declining even faster than those of foreign languages in general, and it is a difficult situation to deal with. My own way of increasing options has been to develop a program of guided independent study courses that offer our majors and other advanced students some options beyond our limited offerings, but that cost relatively little time and effort to administer-a sine qua non, since these courses don't count as part of one's regular teaching load. The program seems effective both in meeting student needs and in increasing our enrollment. Since its effectiveness derives at least in part from way it came into existence, let me describe briefly that process of development. In 1968 University of Rochester asked me to design a that would teach students with little or no prior background in how to read without worrying about other language skills, in hope of increasing enrollments in undergraduate literature courses. While that particular was not an overwhelming success, problem of the reading course had caught my attention, and when I moved to Cleveland State University in 1970, I developed a Reading Tutorial course.' In 1973 I worked with my colleague, late Professor Robert Oszlanyi, on designing a new Scientific German that had no language prerequisites, and in 1975 I took over myself. This began to interact with independent-study Reading Tutorial to produce, over several years, a remarkably effective and unusual in Reading Technical German.2