Intro to German: First Encounters (Critical / Creative Engagement) [Tasks, Pedagogical Strategies]
Playing with language
- Writing and/or performing poems, rhymes.
- Role playing, creating and performing skits.
- Reader’s theater.
- Drawing or acting out idiomatic expressions.
Confronting difference
- Journal writing / email discussion of what one finds foreign, alien, strange.
- Reflection on cultural/national stereotypes.
- Ethnographic inquiry (interviews, email partnerships, chat-rooms with native speakers and with Americans studying abroad) and analysis.
Making Connections
- Drawing connections between language forms and communicative intent (e.g. with concrete poetry).
- Attending to historical/cultural embeddedness of language (e.g. “das Volk”).
- Guest speakers from within or outside department to discuss content from discipline (e.g. linguist [past tenses], medievalist [poetry], historian [Holocaust].