Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

GER 112A is a first-year level course designed for students who wish to improve their ability to converse in German. Students will have the opportunity to practice the structures and vocabulary they have worked with in their first-year German courses. This course also provides review for students who are entering a second-year German class. This is a three-credit transferable course, and it counts as an elective toward associate degrees.

The student:

1. Communicates using common interactions in variable settings and uses expanded vocabulary, present tense and present perfect tense.
2. Continues to apply language-learning skills to more varied real-life situations.
3. Develops a deeper appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity within the German-speaking world.

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 may be assessed by any combination of the following:

1. Active participation in class in the target language
2. Short individual presentations
3. Short frequent contextual written tasks (in or outside of class) to assess
4. Oral interviews with partner or instructor
5. In-class, interactive student role-plays with a partner or in small groups

Themes:
Include all or some of the following:

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 but not limited to: using the post office, finding a place to live, housework
8. Geography
9. Transportation
10. Food, cooking, household appliances, dining out
11. Childhood

Concepts and Issues:
Include all or some of the following:

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

Competencies and Skills:

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