Germanic Languages and Literatures

The instructor in a beginning German class wrote and filmed a puppet show for the class, who then created their own puppet shows using the vocabulary they had learned. This exercise fostered comprehension and decreased students’ inhibitions about speaking...

In her classes, Professor Judith Ryan teaches students close reading by having them identify the important words in a text as a class. For example, Judith takes a small passage of Kafka and projects it using transparencies. (This could be done with a...

In Swedish Ba, Ursula Lindqvist's students do their writing assignments online. They do blog postings where they respond to certain prompts and react to each other's postings. Students first receive a training session on how to do the blogs, and then they...

In Swedish Ba, Ursula Lindqvist has students lead discussion on a current topic relevant to children's issues. This course focuses on children's literature and culture. This intermediate Swedish class is taught according to themes, and in fall 2012, that...

In this activity, Swedish Aa students view music videos of Swedish pop songs ("Ingen vill veta" and "Du vill så du kan") to practice helping verbs and as a prompt for in-class language practice. The instructors, Suzanne Martin and Ursula Lindqvist provide...

In Swedish Aa, Ursula Lindqvist and Suzanne Martin used the song "Den första gång jag såg dig" (The First Time I Saw You) by well-known Swedish troubador Birger Sjöberg to help students learn past-tense verbs and about Swedish culture. For homework, they...

In Swedish Aa, Ursula Lindqvist and Suzanne Martin had students watch a recorded video of the poem "Accounting of Summer" to practice singular and plural nouns, learn new words, experience Swedish poetry, and hear the melodic sound of Swedish. Suzanne...

In Swedish Aa, Ursula Lindqvist and Suzanne Martin have their students watch a commercial for a major Swedish food chain on YouTube in order to practice helping verbs and adjectives while working on listening comprehension and being exposed to Swedish...

In Ursula Lindqvist's Swedish classes, she has the students "warm-up" by doing an exercise that gets everybody talking immediately. With the entire class standing up in a circle, Ursula throws a koosh ball to a student and asks that student a question in...