Using a Virtual Job Search to Implement the "Standards for Foreign Language Teaching" in First-Year German

Abstract

Many college German programs are revising their curricula to respond to the intellectual and professional necessities of the new millennium and to decreasing enrollments in German programs. We see an increase in interdisciplinary and cultural orientations in the German curriculum, and less work on language acquisition via literary texts only.1 Accompanying embrace of other disciplines in content-based, task-oriented, and communicative instruction is the effort to include technology in the German Studies classroom. Technology has found a solid place in foreign language instruction. Film and other media initiated development, and the digital revolution has further inspired foreign language teaching and research on how to use computer technology in the classroom. It has accelerated exchange of information among teachers and students. Many syllabi and handouts are available on web pages and via e-mail. LISTSERVs facilitate discussion of topics such as homework, web sites, cultural issues, and educational software. In short, as Winnifred Adolph and Leona LeBlanc put it, this technology race is ... for real (30). Moreover, the student body -whose computer expertise frequently surpasses that of their teachers-may lack specific expectations about what they will be taught, but they increasingly expect computer technology and the Internet to be used effectively to enhance their language learning. The Standards for Foreign Language Learning mandate goals for cross-cultural, proficiency-oriented instruction for high schools that promise to stimulate the trends noted above in university language departments.2 As Dorothy James observed, Either we look seriously at the curriculum 'bubbling up' from the lower levels in the system, and consider how to work with it, or we continue blithely to set roadblocks in its way and in the way of the students who bubble up with it (12). In Learning Foreign and Second Languages, Heidi Byrnes also stressed the need to continue revising curricula: Although one would expect the bustling language learning activity at the precollegiate level to have worked its way into the college curriculum, such has generally not been the case, at least not in mainstream curricula.... This is not to say that changes have not taken place. They have, but they