GRMN 303: German Conversation
Prerequisite: GRMN 210 or three years of high school German
Credit Hours: (4) Four hours lecture
Intensive situational practice of conversational skills. This course may be repeated twice with different topics.
Detailed Description of Content of Course
Various audio and video programs provide current and historical cultural topics. Situations and intentions targeted are useful in daily and leisure cultural situations. The supplemental audio and video programs are current productions or broadcasts and provide listening comprehension practice, vocabulary expansion, and the basis for class discussion.
Detailed Description of Conduct of Course
Targeted intentions are practiced through role playing in small groups. Examples of this work are then presented to the plenary group. Video, audio, and internet materials are used for listening comprehension practice and/or as material for conversation and informal discussion. Some class time is reserved for the planning and presentation of (group) projects.
Goals and Objectives of the Course
Students will develop oral and aural skills including communication strategies used by the average native speaker in the selected situations. In addition, students develop an ability to converse on a broader range of topics by means of the expansion of cultural horizons and of prerequisite vocabulary in the audio and video programs chosen. In general, students will be able to handle successfully a variety of basic oral communicative tasks and social situations. They can talk about self and family members, can ask and answer questions and participate in simple conversations on topics beyond the most immediate needs. These students will generally be understood by sympathetic interlocutors. Students will be able to understand easily sentence-length utterances which consist of re-combinations of learned utterances on a variety of topics. With some difficulty, students will be able to sustain understanding over longer stretches of connected discourse on a number of topics pertaining to different times and places, however understanding will depend primarily on the familiarity of vocabulary encountered and only secondarily on the complexity of the morphology and syntax.
Assessment Measures
Speaking skills are tested in private oral interviews, evaluated on a daily basis in class based on speaking performance in class, and are also evaluated by means of (group) oral projects. Listening comprehension, while also tested above along with the speaking skills, is specifically targeted in listening comprehension tests.
Other Course Information
None
Approval and Subsequent Reviews
April 2003 Revised Philip Sweet