Make this chapter invisible to your students on the right of this window or use the “Organize” page to the left.

INTRODUCTION

This instructor Manual is designed to help faculty in retaining, reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing (a.k.a., the OER standard) its materials. This chapter of the manual provides general information on the design and development, including the SLA and CALL theories underpinning the project. Each unit includes an instructor information chapter that is pertinent to its materials and resources, with ideas for inserting new materials or adapting the ones provided. These chapters are hidden from student view, but, should this book be used for teacher preparation or professional development, the chapters certainly should be made visible.

HOW TO COPY OR CLONE THIS BOOK

 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. CC BY-NC-SA

Deutschwerkstatt has a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA license, which means it can be copied (CC) with attribution to the author (BY) but may not be sold or used commercially for profit (NC) and any new version must also be shared alike with the same CC licensing (SA). See here for more.

To make a clone of this current version, follow the directions here.  This video also shows how:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pvSpZ_lgRQk%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26rel%3D0

Since it is an open resource, you are welcome to retain, revise, remix, and redistribute any or all parts of your own version, just as long as you abide by the CC-BY-NC-SA license. We have provided some stand-alone seasonal units (Halloween, new years resolutions) as well as film and (soon to come) project-learning activities that can be added in between or into chapters.

Please make sure that all the information (chapters, front matter, and back materials) in the sourcebook (the one you are reading at this moment) is public, i.e., are marked as “show in web” on this base version of the e-textbook before you begin the cloning process. Even sections that will be invisible eventually to students–like these user guides– should be set to visible for the cloning process. Any materials not so marked will fail to copy. Nevertheless, they could be copied and inserted later, so it would not constitute a fatal error: it would simply cost you more time and effort. The H5P learning elements may prove problematic in the cloning process. This link may help in the process if the H5P elements do not automatically clone to your new book. The current elements have been created under a VCU license and thus may not convey to another organization, despite being designated as open. Some institutions have an LTI for H5P so that assessments can figure into their LMS grade book, Discuss these H5P issues with your IT department prior to cloning.

Funding and OER Network

Funding for this project has come from a 2020 VIVA OER grant. The project team thanks our VCU colleagues, especially our fearless Principal Investigator Dr. Kathryn Murphy-Judy, and the VIVA Library Consortium for their support. Our work builds on the OER movement in World Languages championed by the national Center for Open Educational Resources in Language Learning (COERLL) and more recently the Open Language Resource Center (OLRC) along with many, many OER support groups and sites, like MERLOT and the OER Commons.

THEORY AND PRACTICES BEHIND THIS E-TEXTBOOK

In our experience, students sometimes have unrealistic expectations of how much they can learn in a one-semester, three-credit language course.  Therefore, the book reminds students at the beginning of each chapter of their position on ACTFL’s Path to Proficiency.

At the beginning of the semester, the instructor orients learners to the new instructional modalities, including the hardware, software, and wetware for Can-Do learning (and LinguaFolio as a proficiency portfolio), engaging in interpersonal exchanges with native speakers in tandem settings, process writing & peer editing, and project-based language learning. 

The authors are both familiar with high school and college teaching and kept both types of learners in mind while writing the book. The eight chapters follow the AP course content:

• Unit 1: Families in Different Societies
• Unit 2: The Influence of Language and Culture on Identity
• Unit 3: Influences of Beauty and Art
• Unit 4: How Science and Technology Affect Our Lives
• Unit 5: Factors That Impact the Quality of Life
• Unit 6: Environmental, Political, and Societal Challenges         (Source: AP German Language and Culture)

Faculty professional development (PD) in a sustained approach–what could be called “project-based language learning professional development”–has been an important goal for this whole project. Besides getting faculty to reflect on their teaching practices in light of student learning outcomes, satisfaction, and engagement, this undertaking assumes that faculty benefit from engaging in curriculum and materials development and/or revision for the courses they teach all the while discovering current theories and practices in second language acquisition (SLA) and computer assisted language learning (CALL). To that effect, faculty throughout this project have been encouraged to articulate teaching problematics and to explore research-based, practicable responses. Moreover, it has long been shown that once-and-done PD rarely results in actual increases in faculty expertise and sustainable, successful innovation. A major factor in the design of this whole project, then, has been to build sustainable faculty professional development along with innovative instructional materials.

The first principle of this work is the ACTFL 5 C standards, that language teaching and learning is based on communication, cultures, communities, connections, and comparisons. The materials and student tasks presented here interweave all 5 Cs.  The second organizing principle is that language learning progresses along a continuum of growth, with levels along a scale of increasing communicative proficiency from novice to intermediate to advanced to superior and culminating in distinguished. The materials in this e-textbook are designed to help learners move from the novice high/intermediate low proficiency toward a solid intermediate mid/high level across all five skills (listening, reading, writing, speaking, intercultural communication). Furthermore, they integrate the three modes of communication (interpretive, interpersonal, presentational) through a series of formative and summative assessments. Each unit begins with essential questions and Can-Do statements to outline what learners should be able to do upon completion of the unit learning tasks.  Intercultural competence, the most recently added area of proficiency, is equally integrated and operationalized in large measure by exposure to authentic materials, native speakers, and language use. Can-Do framing should be introduced at the beginning of each unit and/or set up in LinguaFolio, the CASLS online proficiency portfolio. More on each aspect of the framework for this book can be found in the teacher’s guide chapter to Unit 0.

Integrated performance assessment is fundamental to the approach in this book. Each unit includes interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational work. We’ll look at each mode separately with respect to the Deutschwerkstatt.  First, the interpretive mode involves learners listening, reading, and/or viewing authentic texts. Their learning is scaffolded so that they can grow their analytical tools (grammar, vocabulary, syntax) to decode the message and then grapple with deeper meanings and pragmatics where background knowledge and cultural acumen are called upon. The introduction to a unit’s interpretive work is found in the beginning of the chapter, where often an authentic text is showcased and serves to elucidate the unit thematic.

The second mode of communication is interpersonal. It includes all manner of immediate negotiations meaning between interlocutors. Most often we think of it in terms of oral conversations, but the means of exchange might also include texting and/or short, unrehearsed video responses like TikTok or Instagram messaging. The emphasis in the Deutschwerkstatt, besides classroom conversations and pair/group work, has been teletandem or other virtual exchanges like Talk Abroad, Boomalang, Conversifi, or Extempore. In real time, learners express themselves and work to understand what others–native speakers, instructors/tutors, or fellow students–are trying to communicate. Applications like VoiceThread or FlipGrid, while excellent tools in the world language classroom, do not provide the true instantaneity of true interpersonal communication. Such apps may, nonetheless, serve as practice tools to help learners develop their ability to respond “on the fly”.

Finally, the presentational mode brings students to produce work for a real audience. Oftimes, the audience is the instructor and/or other students in the class. It can, however, be people outside the classroom, like other classes, community members, target language respondents, or virtual exchange partners. The work produced is not one-off, on-the-fly communication. Rather, it results from sustained, careful composition, editing, and rehearsal. They also present it orally to their classmates. The oral presentations may, themselves, be presentational with sufficient rehearsal and preparation.  The second, summative presentational task entails project based language learning (PBLL). The sum of student learning tasks over a unit or even the semester may be gathered into a final presentation of their project to an authentic audience. Incorporating a final project allows a fully integrated performance assessment (IPA) for each learner.

OTHER ELEMENTS OF DEUTSCHWERKSTATT

This learning approach integrates with an LMS. While the authors have experiences with integrating Deustchwerkstatt into Canvas, Deutschwerkstatt can also be delivered through other LMSs like Google Classroom, Moodle, Blackboard, and D2L. Pressbooks provides different formats for downloads, some of them specific to your LMS. Consult with your IT staff which one to use.

In Canvas, Deutschwerkstatt creates modules for each unit during download. Depending on your version of Canvas (or other LMS), H5P results can be imported into the grade book. However, since the quizzes are, usually, very small in size, using them as formative assessment might be more advisable. Also, keep in mind that some of the H5P functionality might create problems for students with disabilities. In this case, transform the exercise into a plain-text document.