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German Reading S kills for Research

Explore the history and development of German reading classes at Durham University for postgraduate researchers, offering tailored modules and materials to enhance students' academic reading skills in different languages and disciplines.

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German Reading S kills for Research

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  1. German Reading Skills for Research Christine Bohlander, Researcher Development Officer Dr Alex Burdumy, Teaching Fellow for German

  2. History of reading classes at Durham • Epiphany Term 2009: History Department German pilot project for beginners & post-GCSE • Since Michaelmas Term 2009: university-wide provision of reading classes for all Postgraduate Researchers, first in German, then extended to French, later to other languages • Since Michaelmas Term 2010: MA credit-bearing reading skills modules in German and French for A&H at two levels

  3. Classes offered to PGRs9 weeks (1 term), 2 hours per week Different languages: Different levels (for German and French): - Beginners - Post-Beginners - Intermediate - Advanced - German - French - Spanish - Italian - Farsi - Arabic - Russian

  4. Who are the students? Diversity in • Mother tongue • Linguistic background • Subject area • Occasionally members of staff

  5. Target audience in German in Durham: 1) Theologians 2) Classicists 3) Historians 4) Archaeologists 5) Philosophers, law students, political scientists, musicologists, English literature students, etc.

  6. How to go about it?

  7. Course materials • Focus on grammar and sentence structure • What is already out there? • Shop around: which other universities offer reading classes? Oxford, Cambridge, etc. • Little pedagogic literature (out of fashion: the opposite of communicative approach) • Bespoke textbooks for reading academic texts and online resources about grammar

  8. Choice of textbooksome out of print, expensive

  9. Inductive, step-by-step grammar, practice with sentences, ideal for self-study

  10. Deductive, introduces chapters with texts, not easy to navigate

  11. Course Content • Vocabulary: • Dictionary skills and other strategies • Cognates / false friends • Grammar: • Steep learning curve (4 cases in one session) • Based on texts from the start • Consolidation for higher levels: • Based on authentic texts

  12. Pedagogical approach • Skills trained: comprehension skills, “decoding“ of structures, deductive skills, dictionary skills • a bit like teaching Latin • “Islands of knowledge“ rather than “islands of ignorance“ • Toolkit for decrypting German texts • No discipline-specific vocabulary • Identify difficult lexical items, conjugations and structures • “Werden, gehen, handeln, zwar…“, EAPs, reported speech, highly irregular verb forms, certain cases…

  13. Additional considerations • Doesn‘t foster intercultural communication • No production of language (not even pronunciation) • Meta-linguistic skills, students from different disciplines • classicists vs. physicists • Assessment (MA marking) must consider different components: • comprehension skills, grammar knowledge, ability to identify structures and grammatical items, progression, translation skills

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