Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

GER 151 continues the work of GER 150, expanding and perfecting the communicative use of German and cultural awareness. The second term of the two term beginning college course in German, GER 151 is offered for six hours of transfer credit. It satisfies part of the foreign language requirement for the B.A. degree, counts as an elective for the A.A. degree, and contributes to the general education requirements for other associate degrees.
 

Upon successful completion students should be able to:
1. Manage common interactions, in both oral and written forms, in a selected variety of settings using the present, past and future tenses.
2. Apply circumlocution and inference skills when navigating a variety of real world situations in German.
3. Reflect on linguistic and cultural diversity within the German-speaking world and how it differs and/or relates to one’s own culture.
4. Apply a broader understanding of important historical and cultural movements in the target culture through exposure to literature, art and performing arts in the target language.
5. Expand and strengthen strategies for analyzing authentic materials in the target language.

Students will be assessed by any combination of the following:

1. Active participation in class in the target language
2. Short individual presentations
3. Contextual written tasks (in or outside of class) to assess reading, writing, cultural, and aural competencies
4. Oral interviews with partner or instructor
5. In-class, interactive student role-plays

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

1. Living situations including finding a place to live and housework
2. Geography
3. Transportation
4. Food, cooking, household appliances, dining out
5. Childhood
6. Travel
7. Clothing and appearance
8. Body parts, health, accidents and illness; doctors, apothecaries, hospitals
9. Family (expanded), marriage, partnerships
10. Multicultural communities
11. Animals
12. Art and literature

Concepts and Issues:

1. Discussing and comparing living situations, geography and transportation
2. Discussing things that happened in the past
3. Discussing travel plans
4. Talking about clothing, styles, outward appearance
5. Parts of the body, illnesses and accidents, where to go to get medicine and health care
6. Family relations and relationships
7. Social relationships and issues surrounding modern multicultural societies, with a focus on Germany
8. German arts, artists and literature
9. Animals as pets and in proverbs

Course Content: Competencies and skills
The student will:

1. Talk about people and things using comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs
2. Talk about "where" and "where to" using two-way prepositions
3. Refine sentence structure using "time, manner, place" word order
4. Begin to use relative clauses to explain and expand on topics
5. Begin to use "Wo- and Da- Compounds" both as inquiries and answers
6. Begin to describe people and things more eloquently using adjective endings correctly in nominative, dative, and accusative cases
7. Use the simple past tense and past perfect tenses to describe past events
8. Begin to understand and use inverted work order (subordinating conjunctions) to explain concepts such as "because", "during", and "although".
9. Use dative prepositions to talk about things such as travel and relationships
10. Use indirect questions subordinating conjunctions
11. Ask and give directions using various prepositions
12. Express possibility using "würde" + infinitive
13. Begin to use the subjunctive form of modal verbs in polite situations
14. Begin to use dative verbs correctly
15. Have a beginning knowledge of the genitive case
16. Describe cause and purpose using "because", "so that" and "in order to"
17. Have a beginning understanding of reflexive pronouns
18. Review, expand, and further use Wo- and Da-Compounds (prepositional compounds)
19. Review and use the nominative, accusative, dative and genitive cases
20. Expand and review the relative pronouns