German: Redesigning the Major According to Competencies
Questions
- How do you develop a curriculum that is content-oriented from the beginning of instruction and explicitly fosters learners' language acquisition until the end of the four-year undergraduate sequence?
- How might a program of study be more than an aggregation of courses, and how might it eliminate the distinction between so-called "language" courses and "content" courses?
- How might we present a curriculum as an integration of content and language through oral and written textual genres throughout the undergraduate program?
Model: Establishing department goals and assessment strategies
An ideal approach to curriculum design is to identify not only meaningful overall outcomes, but specific competencies, levels of achievement at each phase of the major, and the evidence of that achievement. Although easier to achieve in some fields than others, such a method of rationalizing the entire major according to evidence of learning, along different important competencies, enables both students and faculty to share the criteria for learning and understanding, throughout the major. If student learning goals and their evidence can be identified, then it is possible to calibrate all aspects of the curriculum to these goals.
The New Design
The curriculum project, which the Department of German has called "Developing Multiple Literacies," recognizes that foreign language instruction for adult learners, as contrasted with second language instruction, is fundamentally about engaging these already literate learners in imagined textual worlds, which provide the occasion for thoughtful language acquisition. For its content - as well as its socially situated language use for advanced competencies in listening, speaking, reading, writing - the curriculum draws from a wide range of oral and written genres. These are sequenced in a principled way across the curricular levels, thereby contributing to program articulation. The pedagogies, too, are linked to genres, in contrast with prevailing recommendations about task- or activity-oriented instruction. Thus instructional tasks are inherently connected to the socio-cultural context within which the chosen genres naturally occur in the German-speaking world.
The curriculum spans the entire four-year period of undergraduate study and enables learners to become competent and literate non-native users of German who can employ the language in a range of intellectual, professional, and personal contexts and who can also draw from it personal enrichment, enjoyment, and formation.
The Process: Assessment and Development
The curricular focus on content and language acquisition toward advanced levels of literacy has resulted in placing discourse (or texts in oral and written form) at the center of the "Developing Multiple Literacies" curriculum. This affects materials choices, preferred pedagogical approaches, preferred pedagogical tasks, and the nature of assessment. In its efforts to develop students' writing ability, the program has replaced an additive approach - from word, to phrase, to sentence, to paragraph, to coherent writing event - with a functionalist approach that is shaped through the construct of genre. Within the sequenced levels of the curriculum, in particular, narratives have become a useful way to highlight central characteristics of cohesive and coherent texts and to make learners aware of the shift in semiotic practices that accompanies the shift from telling private stories to presenting public (hi)stories.
Implications and Impact
As a result of the department's shift to a literacy- and genre-oriented and task-based curriculum and to pedagogical practices that reflect that orientation, the departmental teaching staff has also thoroughly reconsidered its assessment policies and practices. Like the curriculum renewal project itself, this, too, was a gradual process, with attention devoted to aspects of assessment at the macro- (policy) level as well as the micro- (course) level, at the beginning of the program (e.g., placement testing) and also at the end of curricular levels through so-called prototypical performances, particularly in assessing students' developing writing abilities. Finally, the department sought to ascertain learning outcomes independent of the curriculum. The department's curriculum has become a widely known model throughout the foreign language community.