The Intensive Course at the Small Universities

Abstract

THE Symposium on Intensive German Courses for Civilians in the January issue included for the most part reports from large institutions. In such cases the sizable staff makes sectioning according to interest and ability feasible, and in many cases informants are available for drill sections. The question arises, however, as to the adaptability of the intensive course to the small department, where one or two instructors must be responsible for literature as well as the elementary and intermediate courses. In such an institution schedule difficulties usually preclude the offering of more than one type of elementary course, and limitation of staff makes long drill periods impossible. Moreover, specialization in either conversation or reading seems inadvisable because of the varying student interests and purposes to be satisfied. The majority of the students enroll in the elementary courses because they wish to prepare themselves for a reading examination, and many of this group are science majors. A few hope to achieve fluency in the spoken language, expecting to be located in Germany, either in the Army of Occupation or in connection with various types of post-war work. The music majors are concerned primarily with phonetics, and some few students always register with a view to preparing themselves for the subsequent study of literature. This past term many small colleges faced another problem, however, one which forced us here to introduce an intensive course which has proved highly satisfactory. The unexpectedly large numbers of veterans returning in February for the second term obliged us to offer a double elementary course, which in one term would qualify the students for the regular intermediate course in the fall. The course, scheduled for six hours instead of three, was in no way different from the regular course except that the work was concentrated into half the length of time, and since the course represented six credit hours instead of three it constituted approximately forty per cent, instead of twenty, of the student's academic load. As in the normal course, we completed a short grammar of twenty-five lessons and read five short detective stories of the type in the Oxford Rapid Reading Series (B and A). These were used as the basis for oral questions and answers in German, for the learning