The Intermediate College German Language Course in the 1990s: Problems and Strategies

Abstract

Intermediate-level college language courses pose a particular challenge to instructors in the mid 1990s. Traditionally designed to be a third and fourth semester grammar review course for students with one year of college-level instruction, the intermediate language course has had to be redefined as various communicative approaches gained popularity in the 1980s. Grammar as the predominant organizing principle of language courses has been called into question. The specific problems of the intermediate German language course that have resulted from its redefinition have not been addressed adequately in literature on second language acquisition. Moreover, we have experienced that there is often a striking drop in enrollment in third-year language courses that is not solely because general college language requirements are limited to two years. Student course evaluations and other modes of assessment reflect student confusion and frustration about goals for the second year. As German departments face the task of increasing the number of German majors to stave off budget cuts, a discussion of intermediate German seems particularly expedient. During the past academic year, the Department of German, Russian and East Asian Languages at our university had the opportunity to invite a visiting DaF (German as a foreign language) instructor from the University of Kiel to work closely with the departmental faculty in order to reorganize the second-year German language and culture course. We were reminded of the advantages of such a cross-cultural pedagogical exchange as we compared American and German approaches to foreign language teaching. We are practitioners of the communicative approach. In this article, we propose to articulate central questions and problem areas that emerged out of a cross-cultural exchange on the communicative intermediate German classroom in the U.S. We shall outline strategies that we have used to come to grips with these problems. As we answer the call for more practice-oriented studies of second language acquisition based on experiences in the classroom (Legutke 56), we hope to launch a long overdue discussion of intermediate German language teaching.