The School of Languages
& European Studies
is proud to present
Making sense of
Modern French and German
an INSET course on French and
German language and culture
for teachers of AS/A2 Level
Outlines
French tenses
made easy
'A la
recherche du temps perdu'.
The session is an
overall look at French tenses and the way they interact and intertwine together
- in the most interesting patterns.
This will
put an end to those long dreaded lists of verbs learnt by heart, tense after
tense, and will enable students become confident travellers through the exciting
world of French conjugation.
Tutor: Mrs
Dominique Medley
Goldilocks
revisited: Telling tales in the language classroom
Marrying language tasks perceived as 'useful' to
creative activities that aim to inject entertainment value into learning is not
easy. Fairy tales - and in particular, the more open-ended and ambiguous
of fairy tales - have the advantage both of being familiar, and of establishing
a framework within which students can quite easily take responsibility for
shaping activities. Using Boucles d'Or as springboard, we can
together devise a variety of spoken and written activities, replete with
functions and grammar points, of indisputable 'use (writing a letter;
interviewing; describing and persuading) but which can also be 'directed' by
students as they take control of 'their' version of the tale (Boucles d'Or may
write to apologise for her break-in; Ouest France might interview a distraught
Madame Ours; Gites de France could feature the newly refurbished bijou
hideaway). Bring your imaginations.
Tutor:
Dr Sara Poole
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The internet
for language teaching
New technologies have become
part of our daily lives and students/pupils want to see them integrated in our
teaching. In this presentation, I aim to look at free programmes/software
on the web that help you create material (text with gaps, definitions, drag and
drop games, etc). They're all very easy to use and convert into templates.
Also we'll see how to record, edit and save audio files for exercises online or
in the language lab. The web is a goldmine and it's never been so user
friendly!
Tutor: Dr Arnauld Desandère
Video
classroom: education with vision
Description pending.
Tutor: Mr Ahmed El Rhazi
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German grammar made easy?
How
can one argue that adjective endings in German are easy because there are only
two? Why does a simple sentence such as "Dem Bundeskanzler glaubt niemand mehr"
confuse so many English learners? Why is the traditional time-manner-place
"rule" wrong, but still useful? German grammar is often thought of as
"difficult" and a major problem for the popularity of the subject when compared
to a language such as Spanish. German does have a system and logicality that
makes an English sentence such as "this lecture hall seats 200" appear complete
gibberish, but it could be argued that we see two many rules in German and do
not concentrate sufficiently on certain core strategies. In this session we will
focus on three areas -- the case system, article/determiner endings, word order
-- that are crucial for an understanding of "how German works" and may not be as
complex as sometimes thought.
Tutors:
Dr Ian Roe;
Dr Ute Wölfel
Germany's "doppelte
Vergangenheitsbewältigung"
In the late 1990s, unified Germany was overrun by its past: The
end of the Cold War and its political order generated debates on the forty years
of socialist dictatorship in the Eastern part of Germany but also reopened the
discussion on Germany’s Nazi past. The session looks at the connection between
these two debates, Germany’s ‘doppelte Vergangenheitsbewältigung’. How did the
discussion about East Germany shape the perception of the Nazi past and vice
versa? Does the ‘Stasi’ have anything to do with how we think about the Nazis?
What aspects about the Third Reich were newly ‘discovered’ and highlighted? Is
it a sign of ‘normalisation’ when Germans regard themselves as victims of the
World War II? How did the ‘doppelte Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ change historical
thinking and cultural memory? The session ends with a presentation of two
examples of recent Erinnerungskultur.
Tutors:
Dr Peter Barker;
Dr Ute Wölfel
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Trends in
contemporary German
Learning a foreign language means learning
its standard variety, which we tend to think of as 'stable' and 'approved'.
In reality, however, the standard variety is a contested site which social and
regional groups fight over. Feminists, youths and professionals exert
influence on standard German in the same way that regional dialect speakers do.
How do they change German? What traces do they leave behind? How can
these traces be analysed linguistically and discussed culturally? The
session looks at important developments and changes in the German language in
recent years focusing on the German young people speak nowadays as well as the
recent debates on the 'genderedness' of German. Besides the analysis of
examples and their positioning in the broader German cultural context, the
session suggests how to work with trends in modern German language in the
classroom.
Tutor: Frau Kerstin
Scheja
Genres and
text-types
Speaking and writing a language is not just using words and sentences but using
the right ‘text-pattern’. Numerous such patterns with a preset topic, style,
grammatical structures, perspective, user context, determine our language and
cultural competence. This session looks at two such patterns: the genre of
autobiography and the text-type of newspaper film review. We examine both their
text-pattern and its cultural importance. Autobiography as well as film reviews
were crucial in post-unification Germany as they strongly influenced the
perception and understanding of the ongoing cultural changes. We discuss
questions such as ‘Why did they become so important in the 1990s?’ ‘How did they
shape the image of Germany?’ ‘How were they themselves influenced by the public
debates?’ Special attention is given to the autobiographies of young writers; as
they most vividly document the impact of cultural change on personal lives. The
discussion of film reviews evolves around examples from a range German
newspapers and their differing role in shaping the public debate; we focus on
reviews of films that deal with the current issue of German national identity.
Tutors:
Dr Ian Roe;
Dr Ute Wölfel
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For information or to book your place, please contact
Mrs Janice Brooks at the following
postal address, phone/fax number, or e-mail:
School of Languages and European Studies
University of
Reading
P.O. Box 218
READING RG6 6AA UK
Tel. +44 118 378 8123 (International), 0118 378 8123 (UK)
E-mail: j.i.brooks@reading.ac.uk
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