Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

GER 102 is offered for four hours of transferable credit. It meets four hours per week and it is the second term of a three term sequence which equals one full year of German. This course satisfies part of the foreign language requirement for the B.A. degree, counts as an elective for the A.A. degree, and contributes to the general education requirement for other associate degrees.

Upon successful completion students should be able to:

1. Manage common interactions, in both oral and written forms, in predictable settings using the present and beginning work in the past tense.
2. Apply circumlocution and inference skills, at a beginning level, when navigating selected real world situations in German. .
3. Identify a limited range of linguistic and cultural diversity within the German-speaking world and how it differs and/or relates to one’s own culture.
4. Develop a limited understanding of selected historical and cultural movements in the target culture through exposure to literature, art and performing arts in the target language.
5. Apply some strategies for analyzing authentic materials in the target language.

Students are expected to attend all classes, participate actively in classroom activities, and prepare oral and written homework assignments. Students may meet with the teacher in conferences. After the introduction to the course, German will be used in the classroom at all times. Students should plan to spend one hour in preparation and practice outside of class for each class hour.

Students will be assessed by any combination of the following:

1. Active participation in class in the target language
2. Short individual presentations
3. Contextual written tasks (in or outside of class) to assess reading, writing, cultural, and aural competencies
4. Oral interviews with partner or instructor
5. In-class, interactive student role-plays

(These concepts are not necessarily presented here in the order presented in class; presentation depends largely on the makeup of the student
population in a specific course)
Themes:

1. Gifts and doing favors for people
2. Occupations
3. The workplace
4. Location of things using dative prepositions
5. Holidays
6. Famous Germans and their occupations
7. Living situations including finding a place to live and housework
8. Geography
9. Transportation
10. Food, cooking, household appliances, dining out
11. Childhood
 

Concepts and Issues:

1. Celebrating holidays, giving and receiving gifts, doing favors
2. Talking about how the German education system differs from the US
3. Discussing occupations, work, work ethic, vacations in German-speaking countries compared to the US
4. Discussing and comparing living situations, geography and transportation
5. Discussing things that happened in the past

Competencies and Skills:
The student will:

1. Identify and use the dative case: articles, possessive adjectives, prepositions, personal pronouns
2. Use the verb "werden" to express change and in the future tense
3. Formulate and answer questions using who and whom in both the accusative and dative cases
4. Expand and review the present perfect tense; present perfect with separable verbs
5. Review and improve use of nominative and accusative cases
6. Talk about people and things using comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs
7. Talk about "where" and "where to" using two-way prepositions
8. Refine sentence structure using "time, manner, place" word order
9. Begin to use relative clauses to explain and expand on topics
10. Begin to use "Wo- and Da- Compounds" both as inquiries and answers
11. Begin to use adjective endings correctly in nominative, accusative, dative cases in order to describe people and things more eloquently
12. Begin to recognize and use the simple past tense and past perfect tenses to describe past events
13. Begin to understand and use inverted word order (subordinating conjunctions) to explain concepts such as "because", "during", and "although".