Intermediate Language Course Research Articles

Social justice in the language classroom: a roadmap for lower-division Spanish curricula

ABSTRACT This study investigates 70 university participants’ selection of topic and acceptability relating to the explicit inclusion of social justice topics in intermediate language courses in universities in the United States. This study draws from the Critical Pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching as frameworks in the second language (L2) classroom. Participants enrolled in intermediate-level Spanish courses completed a series of projects in which tasks centered on social justice topics of their choosing. Qualitative data analysis revealed that language learners perceived the projects as opportunities to use real world, authentic language with the purpose of communicating in the target language. Learners reported that the incorporation of social justice in the L2 classroom provided new, meaningful learning while they developed greater awareness of issues affecting the world and acquired vocabulary and speaking skills. As a result of this study, findings support inclusion of social justice topics, even in lower-division courses.

Teaching Babylon Berlin: Language and Culture Through a Hit TV Series

AbstractFilm courses are now standard offerings in collegiate world language programs, but instructors have only begun to consider the unique benefits of teaching a television series to engage language learners in meaningful communication. As series have become the entertainment of choice for today's students, educators should consider the opportunities in developing course materials around extensive viewing tasks. Following a literacy‐based approach, this article presents an intermediate language course designed around the hit German‐language TV series Babylon Berlin (Sky/ARD 2017‐present). Extensive viewing can help students develop critical interpretative skills and visual literacy while also addressing the need to target students' listening skills. This article situates this course within research on teaching with film and television and highlights how teaching with a series can provide rich cultural content as a backbone for course design that motivates intermediate learners to learn more about interwar history, culture, and politics. The article also offers reflections on the benefits and challenges of using television as a primary text and provides sample classroom activities, assignments, and assessments.

From the Editors

We are delighted to share with you a wonderful collection of articles in this fall issue of Die Unterrichtspraxis. Not only does this issue contain five regular articles, but we also present a special section on “Sustainability and Community Engagement in German Studies,” co-curated by Kiley Kost, Dan Nolan, and Seth Peabody. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are the focal point of Franziska Schweiger's article, a topic that recurs throughout the issue. Schweiger examines the intersection of contingent faculty labor and institutional diversity and offers four concrete steps for how German teachers and professional bodies can address systemic structures. The article by Karin Wurst proposes to tackle reforms in undergraduate and graduate education in tandem, being mindful to maintain student interest while also preparing graduate students as the faculty of the future. Joshua Brown presents a culturally relevant approach to food customs in the German curriculum, an article co-written with two former students, Tristan Devick and Connor Zielinski. It highlights the implementation of culturally relevant and critical pedagogies of language learning to address issues related to social awareness in the language classroom. Next, Kathryn Sederberg introduces an intermediate language course designed around the hit German-language TV series Babylon Berlin, including sample classroom activities, assignments, and assessments. The course follows a literacy-based approach, developing students' critical interpretative skills and visual literacy while also addressing the need to target students' listening skills. The last regular article by Kerstin Kuhn-Brown demonstrates how a genre-based textual analysis of Karin Bloth's narrative Stark und ohnmächtig zugleich (2004), through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics, can serve as a useful methodology for advanced learners of German to support their analyses of GDR texts and materials. The six contributions in the special section are introduced by the co-curators in their section introduction. As always, we close with a big thank you to our authors, reviewers, and Editorial Advisory Board for their dedication to our profession, particularly in these ongoing tumultuous times. All articles are doubleblind reviewed by a minimum of two expert readers. Please consider adding yourself as a reviewer to our database at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/up and sharing your manuscripts. We especially welcome contributions on flexible models of language instruction, language for professional purposes, education abroad, and collaborations between K-12 and college instructors. If you are interested in writing a book or software review for the journal, please contact the book and software review editor Dr. Dan Walter. Bleiben Sie gesund!

Using Literary Texts in Foundational Spanish Courses: Why I Teach "A Julia de Burgos"

Using Literary Texts in Foundational Spanish Courses:Why I Teach "A Julia de Burgos"1 Colleen Scott (bio) . . . yo iré en medio de ellas . . . —Julia de Burgos, "A Julia de Burgos" The poem "A Julia de Burgos" by the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos clearly expresses the theme of duality and the double, specifically the battle between the public and the private self. Dualities are everywhere—images and screens projecting one's constructed reality contending with one's inner self. There is a dualistic state, too, within current pedagogical practice: on the one hand, a need to use technology and social media and, on the other, a more back-to-basics approach. Real-life, task-based approaches are certainly in favor, but we should not undervalue the use of literary texts in introductory and intermediate language courses. Teachers and textbooks include readings that they believe have literary merit, but how are students today going to receive these works that are not part of popular culture? How are students going to identify with the characters (or poetic voice) or the time period? Television, film, and the Internet provide our students with ample exposure to pop culture as it relates to the target culture, but many introductory-level and intermediate-level students lack exposure to aspects of the target culture's artistic and literary achievements in these early phases of language instruction. Many students know who Evita, Frida, and Selena are but not Julia. [End Page 107] Perhaps they will discover the intertextual reference to Rocinante, Don Quixote's famed horse. The poem "A Julia de Burgos" is a powerful pedagogical tool as it provides a lexical focus but also promotes cross-cultural understanding, and students feel a sense of accomplishment for having read and understood a poem in the target language. The purpose of this paper will be to discuss the importance of teaching such a literary work in an intermediate-level (third-semester) Spanish class and to demonstrate how students can interpret and interact with the poem. It seems most appropriate to use literary masterpieces (known and not so well-known) in the courses where the stress is upon learning the target language and culture. The poem is a great example of a Latinx woman writer in exile. Burgos was a Puerto Rican poet, who was an advocate for women, blacks, and the working class. In an era when it is important and necessary to self-advocate, students discuss the important themes of this poem: be true to who you are, and live according to your beliefs and desires and not those imposed upon you by society. Students see how this poem about freedom of expression, written in the 1930s, is absolutely relevant today. The poem serves as a model text for writing style, but it also has a communicative purpose in that students can react personally to the poem. At the intermediate stage of language learning, students are encouraged to form and express opinions in the target language, while also gaining linguistic and cultural knowledge. As we know, one fundamental function of language is the transmission of identity. The themes of the dichotomized self in relation to society and of identity as performance are discussed as we read "A Julia de Burgos." But it is also important for learners to understand that what we speak and how we speak form a part of who we are and how others see us. Do our personalities change when we speak another language? A different you? Yes, as the second-language learner migrates to a new language, a process begins that involves a separation from familiar structures (the native language). Students can feel inhibited when trying to speak another language and to generate unfamiliar sounds and structures. They may experience language anxiety because they do not understand or cannot produce an utterance. The language student is essentially starting over, learning to speak and to understand from a new perspective, forming a new social self. As such, the disparity between [End Page 108] the "true" self and the more "limited" self in the language classroom needs to be reconciled. Just as Burgos had to adapt to a new land, the language student...

Exploring Korean Heritage Learners' Perceptions of Heritage Language and Learning

ABSTRACTThe present article explores Korean heritage language (HL) and learners from the learners' perspective, and calls for further discussion and/or collaborative work from the field of HL education. This is a survey study that aimed to address seven aspects regarding HL and learning from the learners' perspectives. These included issues of HL learner identity and the benefits and challenges of studying their HL in an academic environment. The qualitative responses were collected through an online anonymous survey of heritage students (N = 22), who took a heritage track intermediate language course at a private university in the United States during the academic years 2014–2016. Findings from the data collected accounted for whom and where the learners are in terms of their HL identity and motivation in learning. This allows Korean language educators to gain insight into HL learners' perceptions and learn which language-learning strategies students find most useful. By the same token, the students' learning goals and self-identified strengths and weaknesses should be reflected in all respects in developing an appropriate HL curriculum and learning materials.

LEARNING JAPANESE LANGUAGE IN INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA: IS FACEBOOK AS AN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE HELPFUL?

Facebook (henceforth FB) is currently considered as the most popular platform for online social networking among university students and it is confirmed that Malaysia has the highest FB usage in South East Asia (Toh, 2011). With this in mind, a study was conducted to investigate the benefits of the usage of FB in learning Japanese language in institutions of higher education. This study investigated if FB as a useful and meaningful learning tool was able to support and enhance the students’ learning of Japanese language. The project involved 32 undergraduates enrolled in an intermediate language course of Japanese Language Minor Program in a local institution of higher education in Malaysia. This project explored how the students used FB for academic purpose to enhance their learning. The role of teacher was coordinating activities, monitoring group progress and encouraging reflection on language and content. All major components of the Japanese language class-based lesson remained the same as in the previous semesters. The FB group functioned as an alternative space for student discussion outside of class, not a replacement for Japanese language lesson or any other course components. The teacher, as the monitor of the FB group, found all 32 students to be active participants in every activity initiated in the FB group. It was found that FB facilitated the learning of Japanese language. Data collected from interviews suggested that students will use FB as an alternate mode of communication and the enjoyment level of learning Japanese language enhanced further.

The effectiveness of online teaching in an advanced Spanish language course

Studies on the effectiveness of online language teaching have generally centered on basic or intermediate language courses. The present study examines the effectiveness of an advanced‐level online Spanish grammar course. Two sections of the course are compared: one is offered face‐to‐face, and the other is offered fully online. The goals are both to measure students' achievement in the two sections, and to better understand specific challenges faced by online teaching. The study shows that there was significant improvement (learning) in the online section, and that learning is indeed comparable to that shown in the face‐to‐face section. However, we identify and discuss one specific challenge faced by an online format: the different nature of the interaction between the learner and the learning environment.

Séquences: Intermediate French through Film by Michèle Bissière, Nathalie Degroult

in this context is defined as the collection and analysis of natural, speaker-driven language that is not elicited solely for the purpose of corpus creation. Absent among the sixteen chapters involving thirty different authors are sections solely devoted to phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. Each section begins with a reflective state of the art chapter replete with relevant definitions (for example,corpus-driven versus corpus-based studies), the pros and cons of corpus-based approaches, caveats, and wish lists.This iterative (yet not redundant) format strengthens the cross-pollination that continues in the two to four case-study chapters that follow each heading. Specifically for French, a repeated call for a large-scale (spoken) corpus emerges. Given the primary focus on data in the volume as a whole, it is surprising that only chapter 4 offers a list of databases with notation regarding public accessibility.However,the reader does repeatedly encounter thoughtful attempts to raise awareness of the limitations of current approaches to data resulting from, for example, corpus tagging that focuses on forms or outdated categories, or by doing concordances without recourse to traditional reading. Such caveats are particularly relevant in this era that finds corpora available and used in ways not originally imagined by the collectors, but also as a reminder that corpora as presented are not complete stories. Nevertheless, the advantages of corpus research, including speed, scale, and accessibility, are evidenced in the supporting chapters of this volume, ranging in topics from grammaticalization of the French adverb autrement (ch. 2) to post-verbal complement word order (ch. 6) to langue des jeunes (ch. 9) to L2 spelling (ch. 16). Each situates itself in the larger conversation of the particular field within linguistics, the volume as a whole, and the specialized topic at hand. In short, this highly readable yet substantive volume illustrates on a microlevel the collaboration crucial for seeing the forest for the ecological trees. University of Missouri, Kansas City Lindsy L. Myers Methods and Materials edited by Frédérique Grim Bissière, Michèle, and Nathalie Degroult. Séquences: Intermediate French through Film. 3rd ed. Boston: Cengage, 2016. ISBN 978-1-305-10565-2. Pp. 399. $153. The main evolution of this edition involves two revised chapters (2 and 8) where the authors replaced Rue Cases-Nègres and Le dîner de cons with Monsieur Lazhar and Intouchables. This seems like a wise choice as the new chapters reflect themes that are more current and the realia and activities allow students to explore new topics through readings and grammar activities for the guided discussions in class. In addition to the two completely revised chapters, the edition contains enhancements to the previous iterations: updated Arrêt sur images modules and more pronunciation work. These 186 FRENCH REVIEW 89.2 Reviews 187 additions allow instructors to focus on each topic as it relates to their goals by exploring all the exercises, or by picking from the vast selection. As a further complement, the Cahier has also benefited from updated realia and web activities. The updates provide more exercises under the rubric of Le français parlé, which are particularly helpful to students honing their oral and aural skills. The diverse activities engage students in interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational skills while also considering the diverse communities represented in the film selection. By focusing on French-speaking communities , the book aims to achieve the major linguistic and cultural competencies students need and expect from a foreign language course. Equally, the chapter on L’auberge espagnole can inspire discussion on study abroad opportunities and allow instructors a perfect moment to encourage their students to participate in an experience abroad. I like the idea that there are explicit connections to activities beyond the classroom that aid students in achieving multiple learning environments. Given that asset, there have been quite a few books geared toward that population (Mise en scène, Cinéphile, Cinema for French Conversation, Francophone Cultures through Film, La France contemporaine à travers ses film). Séquences certainly has a place among those titles as an intermediate language course. However, I think it could also be used as content for multiple platforms given the wide array of...

Modern French Literary Studies in the Classroom: Pedagogical Strategies (review)

Reviewed by: Modern French Literary Studies in the Classroom: Pedagogical Strategies Marvin Richards Stivale, Charles J., ed. Modern French Literary Studies in the Classroom: Pedagogical Strategies. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2004. Pp. 270. ISBN 0-8735-2805-0. While the field of second language acquisition has no shortage of theories and methodologies, exposed and debated in journals and books, and neatly condensed in a number of excellent works tailored for beginning and experienced "language" instructors, the same cannot be said of cultural and literary studies. That is, there are no handbooks for how to teach the nineteenth-century novel, for example. This is probably a good thing, given the myriad angles or even goals one could have, and the wide-open corpus of novels available, but it is also true that there is precious little guidance offered to graduate students or available to current faculty on how to approach – or improve – teaching "French Studies" after the beginning and intermediate language courses. This recent book on pedagogical strategies for "modern French literary studies" is anything but a manual or cookbook for teaching literature and culture. It is, however, a collection of twenty thoughtful essays written by teacher-scholars to illustrate and stimulate what editor Charles Stivale underlines in the first sentence of his introduction: "The operative principle that inspires this volume is succinct and deserves all the emphasis one can muster: TEACHING MATTERS" (1). Indeed, one could argue, as Stivale and his co-contributors [End Page 476] do, directly and indirectly, that the survival, or at least good health, of our discipline depends on good teaching. This volume, without falling into simplistic or fatalistic formulas, provides a wealth of ideas and inspiration to tackling the difficult pedagogical aspects of our field, from a multitude of positions that have in common a concern and enthusiasm for French studies. It is a welcome and highly recommended book that will appeal to both new and seasoned teachers, and even to departmental chairs and administrators, for it articulates the relevancy of literature and cultural studies as it offers food for thought on how and what we teach. It would be impossible in a short review to give fair treatment to all twenty essays, even though each deserves consideration. I will thus paint only the broad lines of the four sections, with due mention of the contributors. In the first section, "Instructing Readers: Linguistic and Literary Frameworks," the focus falls on integrating language and literary studies, and on fostering creativity as well as critical thinking in students. Kate Paesani examines the use of literature in beginning and intermediate language classes while David Powell shows how linguistics, from grammar to phonetics, can be incorporated into the study of literature. Gayle Levy shows how to read Mallarmé's difficult poem Un coup de dés in what she calls a polyphonic mode, dans tous les sens, tapping into a creative (and not strictly interpretive, exegetic) approach that even students in introductory literature classes can appreciate and that prepares them for other modernist works. The last essay in this section, by Lawrence Porter, Anita Alkhas, and Larry Kuiper, also places the importance on creativity and developing critical thinking, to foster good reading and writing practices, as well as originality and self-expression. The second part, "Exploring the Cultural: Pedagogical Devices," tackles the false dichotomy of literature and culture on the one hand, showing, with examples of genuine integration, at the undergraduate level, of cultural and literary studies with innovative and engaging approaches. Anne McCall describes her experience incorporating cultural studies into the traditional literature survey, in addition to employing group work in undergraduate research projects. This theme of collaborative work and integrating cultural studies also informs Adrianna Paliyenko's innovative course entitled "The cultural legacy of nineteenth-century France" in which students made PowerPoint presentations. Similarly, Kathryn Grossman shows how to enliven a course on Hugo with CD-Rom technologies. Véronique Flambard-Weisbart gives us an example of a global simulation for a course on literature and culture, while John Anzalone uses the concept of margins to teach fin-de-siècle texts at a "smallliberalartscollege" (sic, 108). Finally, Michael Garval brings together a...

Access French 2: An Intermediate Language Course

Access French 2: An Intermediate Language Course

Access French 2: An Intermediate Language Course by Bernard Grosz

Access French 2: An Intermediate Language Course by Bernard Grosz

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

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.

FAX-Technology for Essay Exchanges with German Students as an Enhancement of "c"-Culture

During the past few years, the advent of the so-called electronic has greatly enhanced teaching in the humanities. This is particularly true in foreign languages, and at The Pennsylvania State University an equipment grant from IBM helped establish a classroom equipped with state-of-the-art technology to enhance the writing process in the major languages offered. New rooms seat up to 24 students in clusters of three around computer stations that include interactive software to assist each group in the analysis of written work with the help of various programs. With these tools, students discuss and correct each group's assignments, which the instructor can then project onto a screen for further, plenary analysis. Since all our students now have a computer account, e-mail communication among participants in intermediate language courses as well as between student and teacher has become an integral part of instruction at this level and provides the foundation for frequent exchange of and feedbackon written work and on student queries.1 Beyond such intra-institutional use of e-mail communication, access to the Internet has facilitated the teaming up of entire language classes at numerous schools and institutions all across the US with peer groups in the target language country, thereby adding a new dimension to writing in the foreign language that allows for almost instant response. Such e-mail exchanges have greatly increased students' interest in the fourth and most difficult skill in linguistic instruction; the motivation to communicate with partners on a different continent in the target language has strongly enhanced the relevance of foreign language teaching.2 Despite the opportunities inherent in such exchanges, there are drawbacks to the use of e-mail, especially in lower-level language instruction where the correct use of the German diacritical marks is important. The lack of these languagespecific signs, the less than ideal page layout, and the lack of transmitting facilities for anything like line drawings, pictures, or other signs of additional creative activity shown by participating students convinced me that the use of FAX transmissions in

Computer-Assisted Testing in Intermediate Language Courses

Computer-Assisted Testing in Intermediate Language Courses

A Translation Course for Science Majors

With the abolishment of university-wide language requirements in years past foreign language departments have had to demonstrate their resourcefulness by re-structuring beginning language curricula to match student needs and interests.' This paper describes an intermediate language course designed to provide science majors with those language skills which they will need in their future work. I hope this report will provide information pertinent to those who might wish to incorporate a similar course into their programs.

The Education and Re‐Education of Foreign Language Teachers

THOUSANDS of foreign language teachers, some just graduating from college, have been applying at NDEA institutes where they can be retrained. The federal government spends seven and a quarter million dollars each year to do this. It has occurred to more than one of us that if the teachers were prepared properly in the first place, this remedial work would not be necessary. Directors of NDEA institutes are often shocked by the low level of proficiency of applicants, particularly in speaking and listening comprehension. Transcripts showing superior grades in undergraduate and graduate work reveal nothing about the candidates' ability to speak or even understand the spoken language. Indeed, some of the applicants who receive A in phonetics courses prove to be proficient only in writing phonetic transcriptions and reciting rules; not much importance is given to their actual performance in the language. The phonetics course is traditionally offered late in the students' program so that it becomes a course in remedial pronunciation. One of the juniors in my course in professional preparation said that she had just discovered that there were two pronunciations of the Spanish d. Yet all her grades in the beginning and intermediate language courses were high. She had apparently been graded primarily on her ability to read and write the language, even in her courses in conversation! Often the modern language departments attack schools of education on the grounds that not enough hours of language are required for certification. Yet when educators ask specifically which courses should be added to the teacher education program, the recommendation is more courses in 18th century French or Spanish poetry which consist of lectures in English. These courses are valuable for a romance language teacher's background, but they do not solve the immediate problem of producing FLES and secondary school teachers who can serve as models in classes where near-native pronunciation is demanded. In large universities the administrative problems of coordinating from ten to twenty elementary sections can be very difficult. Graduate assistants, many of whom have never taught before, cannot receive the supervision they need. Some of the senior faculty members whose chief interest is in literary research, often consider the assignment of a beginning language class an onerous task. We are fortunate that several members of our

A German Masterpieces Course in English

When in the spring of 1948 it was decided to institute a course Masterpieces of German Literature in English in the German Department at Northwestern, several far-reaching considerations were fundamental. The first of these was that the number of German literary masterpieces available in truly artistic translation was so considerable and had been so fortunately increased in recent years that it was obligatory to present it in adequate form. The second and more selfish, though equally important, consideration was that the presentation of this material in regular courses would contribute substantially toward fulfilling the broader aims of the department within the framework of the liberal arts program, since it is clearly differentiated from and in many respects goes considerably beyond the teaching of the language itself. It is obvious that even the best elementary and intermediate language courses cannot challenge the scope of a genuine masterpieces course, and on the other hand the advanced and graduate courses are necessarily designed for students either majoring in German or with major related interests. The present collegiate interest in Germany as a cultural phenomenon its history, literature, art and thought is so prominent that even without the grounds cited above there would be adequate reason for attempting to meet it. The availability and the persuasiveness of the translated works, however, permitted of no delay and offered furthermore the most solid bridge upon which to lead the undergraduate into this field of interest.

Intermediate Language Courses

Intermediate Language Courses

Intermediate Language Courses

Author's Summary— This is the third article in the series on language methods at Ohio State. Third‐ and fourth‐quarter courses still stress language as conveying ideas. Methods permit considerable simultaneous practice by all students. Material is more literary than in preceding courses; reading ability is highly developed in coördination with other language skills.