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THE ongoing reinvention of foreign language and literature departments as cultural studies departments has placed renewed emphasis on the study of culture at the undergraduate level. In arguing for this institutional shift to cultural studies, proponents cite a number of intellectual reasons, such as the need to interrogate the literary canon,1 as well as practical concerns, including the very survival of foreign language departments in the face of dwindling enrollments and the growing reliance on adjuncts (see, e.g., Berman, "Reform"; Hohendahl). While we certainly applaud the vigorous turn toward cultural studies in its rich intellectual variety, we nevertheless worry that its instantiation in many departments ignores the issue of language learning, one of the primary missions of foreign language departments in this country. In the past, the relation between language learning and the study of culture and literature has been seen as mutually exclusive (that is, you do one or the other), ordered (that is, first you learn the language, and then you study culture and literature), or independent (that is, language learning is done in the target language, while the study of culture is done in the students' native language). Yet a cultural studies curriculum that is not integrated into the language-learning process from the very beginning runs the risk of reproducing the same damaging institutional split between so-called content courses and language learning.2 Moreover, it also falls short of cultural studies' radical potential to renew our educational mission: to make language study an intellectual enterprise that involves more than proficiency or the mastery of a skill.3 Ultimately, cultural studies promises not only to enrich the language-learning experience for our students but also to save foreign language departments from a fate as mere "service departments" within the university.
Yet even when teachers and scholars recognize that language and culture are indivisible, it is often unclear how to develop a practical classroom pedagogy that leads students to more knowledge about the target language while pursuing a cultural studies agenda.4 In this essay we outline one promising approach based on using a MOO, a relatively simple and inexpensive Internet technology with many features that make it an ideal tool for a wide range of educational purposes, including the study of foreign languages and cultures. In its simplest form, a MOO is a computer program that runs on a server and allows users from anywhere in the world to connect via the Internet to a shared text-based virtual reality environment and interact with each other in real time. Though MOOs allow users to chat with each other, it is important to understand how MOOs differ from similar programs (such as Internet relay chats, or IRCs). For the purposes of cultural studies, two important differences stand out. First, MOOs offer a wider range of communicative modalities. Users can "whisper," "shout," and even "emote"--that is, express actions or feelings much as a third-person narrator in a literary text might describe a character's gestures or emotional condition. Second, and most important, the "object oriented" programming dimensions of the MOO make it possible for users to construct and share a rich textual environment that is constantly changing and expanding. Despite these powerful features, MOOs are nevertheless easy to learn and use; neither students nor faculty members need to be "computer experts." Indeed, now that it has become possible to access MOOssiggang--the bilingual German MOO we began developing in 1998 for teaching and research--directly through a Web browser, using a MOO has become as easy as pointing, clicking, and typing (fig. 1).5 Since all the basic commands and computer messages in MOOssiggang are in German, it allows for a relatively complete immersion experience in the classroom. Nevertheless, our motivation in creating MOOssiggang was to build an environment that not only enabled intensive practice in the target language but also sustained reflection on the processes of cultural production and reception.
We can demonstrate this use of the MOO most easily by outlining a unit on space that we developed for Vassar's Intermediate German course, which met twice each week for seventy-five minutes in a computer classroom. Organized almost entirely around activities in the MOO, the semester-long course had two distinct phases. During the first half of the semester, students got acquainted with MOO technology, initiated an intensive grammar review, and reflected on cultural topics, such as identity and space. (In addition to meeting in the MOO, students also participated in a weekly workshop session to reflect on their learning, practice oral skills, and assess their progress.) In the second half of the course, students from Vassar worked in small groups with students studying English at the University of Münster in Germany to develop cross-cultural projects of their own design. Though this second phase, which involved an extended exchange with native speakers, might represent for many language teachers the most ideal use of the MOO, we strongly believe that the tremendous pedagogical advantages to using MOOs in the foreign language classroom can be realized even without this exchange. Thus, in clarifying the pedagogical possibilities that allow for expanded cultural analysis in a language course, this essay focuses primarily on the introductory language and cultural studies activities before the work with native speakers. Finally, while students working in the MOO continued to become better users of the foreign language, we want to stress that this merger of language learning and cultural studies has encouraged both us and our students to fundamentally redefine language-learning goals and to even rethink what language learning might really mean.
Now according to Star Trek, space is the final frontier. In the MOO, however, space is just the beginning. The goal of our space unit is relatively modest: we want students to understand that space is part of social practice and discourse. Over the first several weeks, students read short German-language texts in which space figures prominently, such as an excerpt from Kafka's story "Der Bau," which portrays a mole's neurotically charged relation to his burrow, and a letter written by the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, in which she juxtaposes the dull confines of her World War I prison cell with the beautiful, emotionally liberating spaces of her memory and imagination. We then ask students to discuss the readings in small groups in the MOO. For each reading, we post virtual notes with reading comprehension and discussion questions on noteboards in the seminar rooms. Since space in the MOO is constructed almost entirely through language, the readings and questions help students to think about ways language can construct spatial reality and express personal and cultural relations to place.
Students in lower-level language courses usually experience frustration when trying to convey complex statements in class discussions. The written conversational form of communication in the MOO, however, enables even third-semester students to draw fairly sophisticated conclusions in the target language with little or no intervention from teachers.6 For instance, in the discussion of Kafka's text in early fall 1999, students noted that--like the mole's series of connected underground rooms--the MOO is very quiet and has many different "tunnels" (see fig. 2). Two students also picked up on the unreal quality of the space in Kafka's narrative by suggesting that the MOO's space is also "not real" or at least "not physical." Not only did students make these astute observations but they also relied heavily on one another in doing so. Such peer learning is exciting because the students' insights are really their own. Moreover, the playful atmosphere of the MOO even encouraged one of the initially skeptical students to make a clever wordplay by noting the similarity between the German word for moss (Moos), which appears in Kafka's story, and the word MOO. By the time we discussed Luxemburg's letter in the next class session, students were able to articulate even more compelling comparisons between the German examples and the MOO. In addition to jokingly equating their lives at Vassar to Luxemburg's prison years, students observed that like her prison cell the MOO is initially a cold, impersonal space. Nevertheless, students also noted that Luxemburg seemed emotionally attached to her prison cell--as if the fantasies it allowed were somehow better than the reality outside prison. This insight helped them to see that words can reorganize one's relation to space (and perhaps also the meaning of that space)--even against the very inhuman conditions of that space.
We hope it is evident how the MOO restructures language-learning dynamics away from drill-like exercises or an exclusive attention to grammatical accuracy by promoting meaningful communication between students through content-based activities. But we also want to stress that these kinds of discussions, though they take place in the target language, do not only further better target language use through an immersion environment. Rather, such assignments ask students to attend to the palpable importance of language in the texts they read and even in the points they make. In such an approach, students begin to realize that language is not a transparent medium for the expression of ideas but often the very foundation for those ideas. Moreover, as a result of these discussions, students have told us that they would like to expand this unit by exploring in more depth the connection between the figuration of space in these texts and the broader cultural contexts in which they were written. Thus, next year we plan to incorporate background readings on gender, socialist politics, and Jews in Germany. This type of feedback from our students shows us that they are beginning to share the responsibility for setting the class's intellectual agenda. What more could we ask from students just beginning to immerse themselves in cultural studies?
Although the MOO facilitates fairly sustained discussions even at this low-intermediate stage in the language-learning process, there are even more exciting applications for language learning and cultural studies. Thus, in the second phase of our space unit, we asked students to translate into practice their insights about space by creating their own rooms in the MOO. Though Jean's room (fig. 3) offers one example that appears engaged in a dialogue with the primary texts we read, students have created over the years a variety of rooms--some realistic and some fantastic, some utopic and some distopic, some intensely personal and some more impersonal but technically refined. In addition to forming the basis for an exploration of space and language, MOO rooms also have practical functions. For instance, students use their rooms as places to store additional objects, such as virtual furniture or even a simple Eliza robot, as well as important educational tools, such as notes, bookcases with reference works (online dictionaries, for instance), and recorders (for recording their discussions in the MOO). Indeed, these rooms serve as work spaces for their owners, and it is here that they often meet with their partners from Münster to work on their projects. The rooms and their objects also remain a permanent part of the MOO as long as their owners wish, creating an archive of sorts for future generations of students.
Of course, at this level every writing assignment in the target language brings up issues of grammar and vocabulary, and we continue to work with students to achieve intermediate-level writing proficiency. Nevertheless, in this assignment we primarily seek to foreground the students' own positionality vis-à-vis the cultural documents they are studying, what Russell Berman has called the "relation between here and there" ("Global Thinking" 10). As Berman notes, such relationality to the cultural artifacts of the foreign culture should structure a core agenda in the cultural studies classroom. In a virtual system, however, activities like room creation offer several unique pedagogical avenues to thematizing that relation. First, the virtual authenticity of MOO rooms, objects, and identities raises the stakes of target language use to the level of cultural production. Thus, producing such objects is less a pretend exercise than an integral contribution to the students' numerous and continuous attempts to fashion their own learning environment. Second, by creating a culture from scratch in the target language, students experience firsthand that culture is neither neutral nor "naturally" available to members of a national culture. Indeed, we believe that the activity helps them appreciate how culture emerges through negotiations of various discourses that claim to represent aspects of reality. Finally, the virtual culture disrupts the easy bifurcations of I/Other or we/them that sit at the heart of cultural studies in foreign language departments (even as such programs work to question such easy divisions). In the virtual reality of the MOO, it quickly becomes difficult to decide what is "here" and what is "there." Though students construct their virtual culture in the target language, there is never any intention to reproduce or even approximate some "authentic" foreign culture. Instead, such assignments easily encourage students to use the foreign language to test the linguistic and conceptual limits of their own culture as well as the foreign culture.
In a cultural studies classroom, it is imperative that the students' cultural production not merely function as an end in itself but rather provide an opportunity for further reflection about the complex process of producing and receiving culture. Claire Kramsch and Thomas Nolden stressed that intermediate language students (and their teachers) need to value student writing by subjecting it to the kinds of cultural analyses practiced on the published writing by famous German authors. Thus, the next assignment in this unit sent students around in pairs to analyze at least two other student rooms and leave their owners a virtual note with a "reading" of that room. The note that two students--Sarah and Debbie--left in Jean's room demonstrates how seriously students took this task of responding to their fellow students' writing.7 In the first part of their note, Sarah and Debbie comment on the kinds of things they saw in the room, such as the fancy carpet and the number of books, and draw solid conclusions about what these objects might indicate about the owner--in this case, an intellectual disposition and a penchant for extravagance. Yet these two readers also proved sophisticated enough in the foreign language to read against the grain of Jean's text by noting an underlying tenor of sadness or aloneness conveyed by the room's serene atmosphere: "The room looks lonely because a person can hear the beating of her heart." In this sense, they recognize the same ambivalence in Jean's room that many students found in Rosa Luxemburg's phantasmic optimism.
Sending students to visit one another's virtual rooms alerts them to the third critical dimension of using the MOO for cultural studies: in the MOO all the cultural artifacts are "public"--that is, anything that students produce can be viewed and visited by their fellow students and other users of the MOO at any time. We believe that the public nature of work and interaction in the MOO refashions the classroom into a community of learners operating within a limited public sphere. Though we only implicitly state this message, one student characterized its effect on her own learning in her first self-assessment submitted as part of a learning portfolio in which students gather their various drafts of MOO documents, their analysis of MOO discussion logs, and other materials pertinent to the class:
I really like the MOO. I am getting used to the fact that every object dropped by me is on display for all to see. The knowledge certainly puts pressure on me to write good German with interesting content. [. . .] At the moment I'm flourishing in the friendly, informal atmosphere of our MOO. [. . .] I find it interesting that in a chatroom environment, people drop their pretense of disinterest and become more immediately involved in discussions.8
As this student makes clear, the public nature of student work in the MOO contributes directly to language learning by raising the stakes of every utterance. Students begin to realize that learning German does not consist of arbitrary exercises or the systematic memorization of grammar rules and vocabulary but rather can become the very means by which they can express themselves and communicate with others.
Though transferring to students responsibility for their own learning induces them to strive toward better and more meaningful language use, we want to emphasize that such classroom practices have important implications for the practice of cultural studies in at least two different ways. First, the MOO helps establish a strong democratic and inclusive learning environment, which is completely in line with the political project of cultural studies. This transformation happens at the most basic level of class participation, since the decentralized structure of communication in the MOO allows everyone to participate, especially shy students or those with relatively weak oral skills. But, as this student's self-reflection also points out, in addition to increasing student participation in class discussions, the MOO also shapes student attitudes toward participation. Thus the publicness of student work combined with the semianonymous nature of the space has the paradoxical effect of letting them drop their concern with appearance and perceive the space as friendly, informal, and conducive to learning.
Second, the MOO produces a similar publicness about classroom practices, making them the site for critical self-reflection. As Jeff Peck theorizes, the metacritical aims of the "foreign" language classroom can only be realized when classroom practices become explicit and enable students to "recognize them as subjects of critical reflection that are ideologically rooted in particular political agendas" (12). To some extent, assignments asking students to articulate their learning goals and assess their learning led many in the class to make the kind of reflective observations that we cited above. But we found evidence that the decentered nature of work in the MOO also intuitively led students to thematize the classroom dynamics during their work in the MOO. For instance, in the discussion of Rosa Luxemburg's letter, one student recognized certain parallels between one of us--Jeff Schneider, who often walks around the room helping individual students--and the guard that Luxemburg hears walking around outside her cell every night. While clearly intended as a joke, the comment also suggests a deeper awareness of our classroom practices, since like Luxemburg's guard professors form a complex symbol of dread mixed with comforting consistency. In the future we hope to include additional activities and readings that will help deepen and make more conscious these kinds of ethnographic reflections about our course and the roles that students and faculty members play.
Peter Patrikis predicted that "once introduced in any meaningful way, the computer changes everything" (38). We have found that activities that involve students in constructing their own target-language learning environments lead--in dramatic ways--to a student-centered classroom organized around autonomous learning and peer teaching. In this kind of environment each student assumes primary responsibility not only for his or her own learning but also for the progress of fellow classmates (see Little). Indeed, our experiences with student work in the MOO support previous claims concerning the benefits of computer-mediated communication in networked applications made by Margaret Healy Beauvois and Richard Kern, namely that "direct student-to-student interaction stimulated students' interest in one another, contributed to peer learning, and decreased students reliance on the instructor" (Kern 470). Over the course of the semester, our students grew increasingly curious about both German culture and virtual culture, transforming themselves into introductory researchers of the relation between language and culture. In this kind of learning situation, the role of the teacher also changes radically, since "with the explosion of the walls of classroom learning, [. . .] the teacher will become a designer of tasks: he or she will no longer direct what students do but instead will create an environment of expectation and of possibility, where students are responsible for what and how they learn" (Patrikis 38). In fact, most of our efforts are devoted to facilitating students' self-reliance and autonomous learning by developing meaningful communicative activities in the MOO, by using learning portfolios to encourage students to define their individual learning goals and analyze their own progress, and by providing careful individual feedback on students' work.
Though we have not yet had the opportunity to conduct a formal, comparative study, there is no question in our minds that the MOO is helping our students become better communicators in the target language. On the one hand, computer-mediated communication significantly increases language use, since it is possible for more than one student to communicate at the same time. Kern's study also shows that students' language output online was more sophisticated than in oral discussions and offered examples of "unfettered self-expression, increased student initiative and responsiveness, generation of multiple perspectives on an issue, voicing of differences, and status equalization" (470). Our own experience supports these findings and suggests that the MOO tends to be a more intensive learning space, requiring a great deal of concentration and creativity from the students as both writers and readers of each other's texts. On the other hand, students are tackling difficult and authentic primary texts above the usual intermediate textbook level. And these texts are not quickly forgotten over the course of the semester but serve as models for students' own literary creations in the MOO and, as Sarah and Debbie's note in Jean's room indicates, repeatedly reappear in their discussions as they draw connections between literary texts and their work in the MOO. In the concentrated yet playful environment of the MOO, our students can accomplish tasks that are usually postponed until upper-level courses. We are very proud of the fairly sophisticated readings and insights that our third-semester students have produced in the target language.
Nevertheless, we also want to stress that the MOO is challenging many traditional language-learning goals, most especially notions of proficiency. For example, in talking with students at the University of Münster, our students have begun to learn that they don't always have to be grammatically correct to make themselves understood to native speakers and that the definition of successful communication is inevitably broader than their textbooks have given them to understand. Indeed, allowing students to produce meaningful culture in a foreign language also unsettles student expectations about the supposedly "natural" connections between language and culture and quickly removes the authority of the native speaker as a stable reference (see Kramsch, "Privilege"). In the end, focusing on the intellectual insights that can be gained from learning in the MOO pushes students to think about language less as a "practical skill" or tool and more as an adventure in learning--as well as a means of producing knowledge about the fundamental relation between language and culture.
This incarnation of cultural studies does not make language mastery a prerequisite but rather is intimately tied to the process of language learning itself. And since students experience making culture at the same time that they analyze it, this model of cultural studies also offers more than just cultural literacy. As Berman has said, cultural studies needs to move beyond helping students "interpret" or "consume" texts to "envision a strategy designed to elicit active producers who engage in a culture rather than merely receive it" ("Global Thinking" 10). In fact, teaching cultural studies in this type of online environment implicitly involves students in debates about the vast cultural shift brought about by a new technological age--as the hypertext author, theorist, and teacher Michael Joyce insists--by showing them that they are engaged, "within the historical scene and not confronting it, authoring the text of our future, projecting and not projected upon" (15). Ultimately, we believe that redesigning language learning as cultural studies holds the promise of anchoring foreign language departments back into the best traditions of liberal arts education. By restructuring our foreign language courses to teach students more than language proficiency, we can offer students the same kinds of intellectual challenges they seek in other introductory courses across the curriculum--whether in the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities.
2Berman talks about this split in "Reform and Continuity." He criticizes the hierarchy that goes along with the traditional division in most foreign language departments, which valorizes the scholarly study of works of literature over other teaching and research missions. Swaffar similarly argues that a splintering into four subgroups (languages, literature, linguistics, and culture) has hurt foreign language departments.
3Kramsch has argued cogently for the need to reconsider foreign language learning as foreign language study. Under such a conception, foreign language courses become more than "a linguistic enterprise" but rather also "a social, cultural, historical adventure" ("Redrawing the Boundaries" 204).
4The German departments at Stanford and Georgetown have each put forward very different models for overcoming the division between language learning and cultural studies. German sections at Stanford University now use readings in English to inject intellectual content into first-year German (see Bernhardt and Berman). While there is much that speaks for this approach, it seems to reproduce the traditional departmental split between language learning and cultural studies within the course itself. In a very different approach, Georgetown has undertaken an across-the-board curricular reform project that integrates "focus on form" language-learning principles with content drawn from literary and cultural studies. Heidi Byrnes, however, acknowledges that the program's descriptions "may strike some readers as too focused on assuring students' continued interlanguage development, seemingly at the expense of emphasizing the intellectual and content goals" of literary and cultural studies. The MOO-based project we describe here is part of our own broader efforts to restructure Vassar's German department as a German studies department in which even language courses become part of an intellectually rich cultural studies curriculum.
5MOOssiggang is essentially a translation of basic commands and computer messages of the enCore Educational MOO Core Database, a freeware MOO core developed by Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes. The name is a pun on the German word Müßiggang, which means something akin to leisure, relaxation, and idleness, and is intended to capture the MOO's dimension of play. Anyone can visit MOOssiggang simply by opening his or her Web browser (Netscape 4.0 or higher, for instance) to http://iberia.vassar.edu:7000 and entering as a guest. Though MOOs offer an impressive range of benefits for language learning, this essay addresses exclusively our use of the MOO as a tool for cultural studies. For a detailed discussion of the MOO more specifically as a tool for language learning, see von der Emde, Schneider, and Kötter; and Donaldson and Kötter. MOOs developed from MUDs (multiple-user dungeons, or multiple-user domains, often known as Dungeons and Dragons), one of the oldest Internet applications. Though the earliest educational uses of MOOs emerged in the field of writing and composition, their use is expanding quickly into other areas in the university curriculum, including foreign languages and cultures. For an introductory textbook designed to help students and teachers use MOOs in a variety of classroom settings, see Holmevik and Haynes, MOOniversity, as well as their edited collection of essays, High Wired, both of which refer extensively to LinguaMOO, the first educational MOO developed with their enCore Educational MOO Core Database.
6Beauvois has found that students "do communicate better as a general rule in the computer lab, if better means using longer, more complete utterances, expressing less superficial ideas, and communicating generally more openly about any given subject" (180). She gives three reasons to explain these findings: the formation of a shared writing environment that supports learners as they collaboratively construct knowledge; the slowing down of the process of writing in this type of environment, which allows students time to reflect and compose a message; and the fact that the interactive, decentralized environment reduces anxiety.
7"Jean's room is intellectual because there are so many books. It will be a good place to read. The person who lives in Jean's room is calm and reflective. Rosa Luxemburg is as calm as the person who is in Jean's room. Because she has a leather sofa and a Persian rug, we believe that her room is very extravagant. The room looks lonely because a person can hear the beating of her heart. The room is very natural, because it is a greenhouse." (Jeans Zimmer ist intellektuell, weil es so viele Buecher gibt. Es wird eine gute Stelle sein zu lesen. Der Mensch, der in Jeans Zimmer wohnt, ist ruhig und nachdenklich. Rosa Luxemburg ist so ruhig wie ein Mensch, der in Jeans Zimmer ist. Weil sie ein ludernes [sic] Sofa und einen Perserteppich hat, glauben wir, dass ihres Zimmer ist sehr extravagant. Das Zimmer sieht einsam aus, weil ein Mensch die Klopfen seines Herzes hoeren kann. Das Zimmer ist sehr naturlich, weil es ein Gewaechshaus ist.)
8This student also emphasizes that the written nature of communication helps her to participate more fully in the course: "I've always been more comfortable with writing than with talking, and the MOO lets me communicate in an interesting combination of conversation and essay. [. . .] The knowledge that I'm under scrutiny isn't as restricting as I thought it would be; I can say pretty much what I mean, within the limits of my German." In this sense, the MOO is ideal for achieving full and active participation in the classroom for all students.
Beauvois, Margaret Healy. "Computer-Mediated Communication: Technology for Improving Speaking and Writing." Technology-Enhanced Language Learning. Ed. Michael D. Bush. Lincolnwood: NTC, 1997. 165-84.
Berman, Russell. "Global Thinking, Local Teaching: Departments, Curricula, and Culture." ADFL Bulletin 26.1 (1994): 7-11. [Show Article]
------. "Reform and Continuity: Graduate Education toward a Foreign Cultural Literacy." Profession 1997. New York: MLA, 1997. 61-74.
Bernhardt, Elizabeth B., and Russell A. Berman. "From German 1 to German Studies 001: A Chronicle of Curricular Reform." Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 32.1 (1999): 22-31.
Byrnes, Heidi. Developing Multiple Literacies: An Integrated Content-Based Curriculum. 16 May 1999. Georgetown U. 20 Mar. 2000 <http://www.georgetown.edu/departments/german/curriculum/intro.html>.
Denham, Scott, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds. A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.
Donaldson, Randall P., and Markus Kötter. "Language Learning in Cyberspace: Teleporting the Classroom into the Target Culture." CALICO 16.4 (1999): 531-57.
Haynes, Cynthia, and Jan Rune Holmevik, eds. High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. "The Fate of German Studies after the End of the Cold War." ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 18-21. [Show Article]
Holmevik, Jan Rune, and Cynthia Haynes. enCore Educational MOO Core Database. Internet. 20 Mar. 2000 <http://lingua.utdallas.edu/encore/>.
------. MOOniversity. Boston: Allyn, 2000.
Joyce, Michael. "New Teaching: Toward a Pedagogy for a New Cosmology." Computers and Composition 9 (1992): 7-16.
Kafka, Franz. "Der Bau." Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Max Brod. Vol. 5. New York: Schocken, 1946. 172-214.
Kern, Richard G. "Restructuring Classroom Interaction with Networked Computers: Effects on Quantity and Characteristics of Language Production." Modern Language Journal 79.4 (1995): 457-76.
Kramsch, Claire. "The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker." PMLA 112 (1997): 359-69.
------. "Redrawing the Boundaries of Foreign Language Study." Language and Content: Discipline- and Content-Based Approaches to Language Study. Ed. Merle Kruger and Frank Ryan. Lexington: Heath, 1993. 203-17.
Kramsch, Claire, and Thomas Nolden. "Redefining Literacy in a Foreign Language." Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 27.1 (1994): 28-35.
LinguaMOO. Ed. Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik. May 1998. U of Texas, Dallas. 20 Mar. 2000 <http://lingua.utdallas.edu>.
Little, David. Learner Autonomy 1: Definitions, Issues, and Problems. Dublin: Authentik Language Learning, 1991.
Luxemburg, Rosa. "Letter from the Middle of December 1917." Deutsches Lesebuch. Von Luther bis Liebknecht. Ed. Stephan Hermlin. Leipzig: Reclam, 1976. 567-71.
MOOssiggang. Ed. Silke von der Emde and Jeffrey Schneider. Sept. 1998. Vassar Coll. 21 Mar. 2000 <http://iberia.vassar.edu:7000>.
Patrikis, Peter C. "Where Is Computer Technology Taking Us?" ADFL Bulletin 26.2 (1995): 36-39. [Show Article]
Peck, Jeffrey M. "Toward a Cultural Hermeneutics of the 'Foreign' Language Classroom: Notes for a Critical and Political Pedagogy." ADFL Bulletin 23.3 (1992): 11-17. [Show Article]
Swaffar, Janet. "The Case for Foreign Languages as a Discipline." ADFL Bulletin 30.3 (1999): 6-12. [Show Article]
Teraoka, Arlene A. "Multiculturalism and the Study of German Literature." Denham, Kacandes, and Petropoulos 63-78.
von der Emde, Silke, Jeffrey Schneider, and Markus Kötter. "Technically Speaking: Transforming Language Learning through Virtual Learning Environments (MOOS)." Modern Language Journal 85 (2001): forthcoming.
| Fig. 2 MOO transcript of students discussing excerpt from Kafka's "Der Bau" (14 Sept. 1999). |
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| Fig. 3 Jean's room in MOOssiggang, which contains Debbie and Sarah's analysis (on note). |
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