Curriculum Design
Let us preface this section by saying that we are aware that most instructors do not have the leeway to independently and spontaneously overhaul their curriculum. As the language coordinators and primary instructors for the two-semester beginning German sequence at our institution, we have more autonomy than most. Nonetheless, as we looked to make our sequence more inclusive in the summer of 2025, we realized that, following the principles of backward design, before we jumped in and started changing all the teaching materials, we needed to zoom out and consider our goals for these courses. Our first step, then was to rewrite the learning objectives for our beginning (first- and second-semester) German courses. We provide our old and new goals here to illustrate our process and hopefully spur you to imagine possible changes to your curriculum. Even if you face more constraints in your ability to revise the curriculum, you may be able to make a few tweaks to your learning objectives.
The old goals, which notably were the same for both the first- and second-semester courses, were as follows:
The goals of this course are to:
- introduce you to the basic points of German grammar so that you can carry out basic communicative tasks, such as asking questions, making requests, explaining reasons, and inquiring about the background, needs, and likes of others as well as stating your own.
- help you acquire necessary vocabulary for expressing yourself on everyday topics relevant to students and travelers in German-speaking countries.
- introduce you to cultural topics most immediately relevant to students of German and travelers to German-speaking countries.
- help you integrate skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening from the beginning in a cultural context.
- provide opportunities for interaction in and continuous practice and review of German.
- help you develop into a skilled and strategic language learner and language user.
As you no doubt notice, culture in this framework is presented as what you need to know to spend time in the country without undue friction, with little attention paid to how and why German culture is as it is, and how it is like and unlike American culture. In short, the presentation fails to challenge students to interrogate the concept of culture itself, be it a foreign one or their own. Accordingly, in our revision of the goals, we focused on foregrounding the culture of the German-speaking lands as diverse while emphasizing the impact each course should have on the learner’s approach to (foreign) culture, as you will see below:
First-Semester German
At the end of the course you will be able to:
- recognize topics of culture and daily life that represent the diversity of German-speaking countries.
- approach new cultural situations with curiosity, open-mindedness, and a willingness to critically examine your own background and assumptions.
- recognize and differentiate the sounds of German and understand basic information on familiar everyday topics from short audio and video clips.
- exchange basic personal information with conversational partners and complete routine tasks such as ordering in a restaurant while comprehensibly producing the basic sounds of German.
- identify key information in a variety of formats such as menus, timetables, short informational texts, and infographics.
- convey simple information about yourself, your family, interests, hobbies and preferences in informal written texts.
- evaluate your own participation and set goals for your progress as a language learner.
Second-Semester German
At the end of the course you will be able to:
- discuss topics of culture and daily life that represent the diversity of German-speaking countries.
- approach new cultural situations with curiosity and open-mindedness and compare your background and experiences to others.
- understand the main idea and identify key information in different spoken contexts.
- represent, interpret and discuss topics concerning social characteristics and cultural practices through conversations and presentations.
- comprehend narratives and gather key information from short literary texts, informational texts, and infographics to interpret and compare.
- write simple, coherent texts about topics from the course and personal experiences.
- evaluate your own participation and explore language learning strategies.
These simple changes make clear to the students that learning about culture is an essential element of learning a language, and that no culture is simple and monolithic. Mastering and demonstrating this criticality is just as crucial to success in a foreign language as memorizing vocabulary and learning grammar. Of course, presenting these objectives to students via the syllabus (likely read once by the students and promptly forgotten) is not on its own sufficient. Crucially, the revised goals should serve as a reminder to you, the instructor, of the importance of a critical approach to culture (easy to lose sight of in the day-to-day of grammar explanations and communicative practice). In the following sections we present ways to align your teaching with the revised learning objectives through changes to teaching materials as well as small, daily, classroom interactions.
