As language programs are endangered in K-16 contexts due to low enrollments, and for budgetary reasons, it is more important than ever to find enduring ways to help promote the study of languages and to make studying languages enjoyable for everyone. For sustainable language education, we need to focus on and promote the true purpose of…

Given that societies across the globe are increasingly multicultural and multilingual, the notion of communicative competence grounded in constricting definitions of national cultures and languages reflects neither our instructional realities nor the sociolinguistic reality of the languages and cultures we teach. To foster students' development of…

Globalizing the curriculum in small German programs with a single faculty member consists of different considerations than in larger programs with more faculty and students. In this dialogue, the faculty members in two such programs discuss what globalizing German Studies means within the context of their small programs and the need to maintain a…

German, and increasingly French and Spanish, programs are by nature global because they attract graduate students and faculty from around the world. Most have studied the language and "big C" cultural products during their graduate studies, but they have not necessarily learned approaches for fostering intercultural communicative…

This article describes a newly designed upper division German language course, "Contemporary Germany: Food, Energy Politics," and two sampling methods of assessment for measuring parallel gains in German skills and sustainable development (SD) thinking. Second Language Acquisition (SLA) informed course design, key assignments, and…

This article documents a curriculum reform of the second-year German program at the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. This curricular reform had two goals: (1) compressing two semesters of intermediate-level language instruction into a single semester; (2) incorporating a strategy-based approach to literary…

This article documents a curriculum reform of the second-year German program at the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. This curricular reform had two goals: (1) compressing two semesters of intermediate-level language instruction into a single semester; (2) incorporating a strategy-based approach to literary…

Since Finnish is not an Indo-European language, studying foreign languages in general and then also studying special fields through the medium of foreign languages may provide an extra difficulty for Finnish students. Most university language centres in Finland have organized reading comprehension courses in several foreign languages for the…

One of the key recommendations of the Worton Review of Modern Foreign Languages provision in higher education in England (2009) is more effective collaboration between language centres and language departments. This paper presents a fully integrated model of such collaboration and develops recommendations for language centres and language…

This article describes the affordances of social media and networks for online Elementary German courses that have been taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 2010. These online courses were created to provide students the opportunity to take Elementary German as part of the language requirement for Penn credit during the summer months…

This paper reports on a project examining the relationship between program model, sociolinguistic factors, and linguistic outcomes in a small sample of school languages other than English (LOTE) programs in Victoria. The languages are Chinese, German, Greek and Italian. Issues under consideration include: content-based versus language-object…

Connections between high school and college-level German programs can be strengthened through a combination of curricular articulation and strategic outreach initiatives. This essay reviews approaches to articulation, examines promising outreach models, and offers guidelines for developing program-specific plans. An analysis of German program…

This paper reports on a research project involving a sample of 19 state-educated students in their first year of a German course at Oxford University. The project is one of a number of research studies into widening participation issues funded by the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) and the Sutton trust. The paper describes the…

Describes the German by Satellite program broadcast by Oklahoma State University to small rural high schools. Outlines school costs for program participation and equipment purchases. Lists program strengths and weaknesses identified in a survey of administrators in 30 participating schools. (SV)

The program evaluated here involved a two-way exchange of students and teachers from a school in Mainz and two high schools in Madison, Wisconsin. Homestay and cultural touring were outstanding aspects of the program. To measure the impact of the program on American participants, tests and questionnaires were administered before and after the…