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BETWEEN 1995 and 1999 enrollment in German language courses in the University of Pittsburgh showed significant gains. Enrollment in first- and second-year German increased by 9.9% and has stabilized to around 380 to 400 students annually. Most of the gain during this period, however, came in the advanced-level courses and in the number of majors. The number of students taking third- and fourth-year courses taught in German grew by 55% and from 1999 to 2001 by another 25%. Looking at the entire period of six years (1995–2001), enrollment in our seven advanced language courses rose by 66%. The same steady increase holds true for the number of majors, which from 1995 to 1999 rose by 66.7% and from 1999 to 2002 by another 60%. In other words, we increased the number of students pursuing a BA in German by two and a half times, from 18 majors in 1995 to an all-time high of 48 majors in spring 2002. This growth is all the more surprising given the fact that the university currently has a minimal language requirement: students who have completed three years of one language in high school with the grade C are exempt from further language study at the college level. Furthermore, this success was achieved under less than optimal staffing and funding conditions.
The University of Pittsburgh has reduced its tenure-stream faculty of arts and sciences by 10% since 1998, and the reduction has affected the German department. When two senior colleagues retired in spring 2000, the department did not lose any positions numerically speaking. However, only one of the two budget lines was reopened in the tenure stream at the rank of assistant professor; the other was reopened as a non-tenure-stream multiyear renewable lecturer position for language coordination. Some relief has come from a slight increase in the department’s allotment of teaching assistants. The German department relies on graduate student teaching assistants for delivering first- and second-year language instruction. Given these staffing constraints, the department has chosen to focus on the German language and the historical development of the German-speaking world since the eighteenth century to best meet the demands of its student body.
The German department’s salary budget for its seven faculty positions and eleven teaching assistantships (including graduate tuition) is fully funded by the University of Pittsburgh, as is the department’s operating budget, from which everything from supplies to expenses for speakers has to be paid. About 80% of the operating budget has to be spent on day-to-day needs, leaving only a limited amount for cocurricular activities or new initiatives. In addition, the university provides a small research budget and regular upgrades for computer equipment for each tenure line. The lecturer position has to date never received this kind of funding. The Center for West European Studies as well as the International Business Center at the University of Pittsburgh have been very supportive in providing funds for the professional development of the language coordinator. We believe that these non-tenure-stream lectureships, defined as teaching and administrative positions, need to receive regular funding for professional development just as much as tenure-track positions do.
A variety of factors have helped the German department to overcome challenges in staffing and funding and to counteract the nation-wide decrease in German enrollments. The keys to our success can be summarized as follows:
commitment to language teaching on all levels as part of the liberal arts educationa well-structured language-acquisition program and emphasis on linguistic proficiency throughout the major’s curriculum
quality teaching and advising
new curricular and programmatic initiatives to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student body: certificate in German language, content-based instruction in the area of professional German, and a new MA track
an affordable study-abroad opportunity in Germany
cocurricular activities
cooperation with local middle and high schools
The institutional framework of Research I institutions such as the University of Pittsburgh poses the same challenge for every foreign language and culture department: how to integrate the scholarly interests of the faculty members and graduate students in literature and culture with its mission in language teaching. Outsourcing all language acquisition to a designated language-learning center is a model that has much currency at the moment. Our success over the past seven years, with a 20.67% enrollment increase in the entire language-acquisition curriculum and an over 100% increase in the number of majors, shows that alternatives are possible that do not require faculty lines to be filled with foreign language acquisition specialists, although it is imperative to have at least one such specialist among the tenure-stream faculty.
Currently, five of our six tenure lines are held by faculty members pursuing research in literary criticism, film, and cultural studies. One tenured faculty member and a lecturer concentrate on language pedagogy. Nevertheless, all faculty members from assistant to full professor regularly teach in the language program. These faculty teaching assignments are typically at the third- and fourth-year level, except for that of the language coordinator. Every faculty member takes responsibility for our students’ linguistic development and in turn retains a realistic picture of what our juniors and seniors can do with their language skills in our seminars. The faculty has also developed a consensus that all courses counting toward a degree offered by the German department, including all courses for the major, ought to be taught in German.
More important, we have tried to bring research interests and language teaching of both faculty members and graduate students into closer alliance. The redesign of the second-year language sequence by two faculty members in 1995–96 is an example of how this can be achieved even in the beginning language courses. The goal was to bring authentic cultural materials into the second-year language classroom that would reflect the increasingly multicultural character of Germany and help students understand the historical forces that shaped the nation. At the same time, the second-year language sequence still needed to serve as a review of the basic structures of German grammar learned in the first year. Instead of using a second-year language textbook, our students now read an unedited, illustrated children’s book, Neben mir ist noch Platz, which teaches about Germany’s difficult transformation into a multicultural society by looking at the friendship between Stephanie, a German elementary school girl, and Aischa, whose family fled the civil war in Lebanon. In the next textbook, Stimmen eines Jahrhunderts, students explore the topics of childhood and youth, particularly with regard to gender and social class, by working with texts by Ernst Toiler and Klaus Mann, with drawings by Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz; they also view film clips by Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Werner Herzog.
Instructors—primarily our graduate student teaching assistants—and learners are both enthusiastic about working with authentic materials at this early point in the language curriculum. At the same time, this revamping of second-year German along a cultural studies approach poses challenges for the instructor, particularly in finding the appropriate linguistic register for a course taught entirely in German. It is equally important to relate historical material to the present-day experience of our language learners and thus translate old-fashioned German language into contemporary German. For example, banking vocabulary can be introduced based on a letter by the composer Gustav Mahler, who was not good at managing his money (Lixl-Purcell 19). What the approach takes is a lot of imagination and creativity.
The department does not subscribe to one specific language-teaching approach but does agree on the desired outcome, namely, a functional knowledge of the target language. Functional knowledge requires both linguistic and cultural competence. The crucial step in any language program is that from one level to the next. Aside from trying to integrate the scholarly interests of the faculty with the necessities of the language program, we designed the second-year German sequence with these two aspects in mind: development of cultural proficiency and a better preparation for the leap into the third year.
Our dominant approach to language teaching is oral-proficiency driven and communication-oriented, but we remain attentive to grammatical accuracy. Successful communication depends on a certain level of grammatical accuracy, which is in turn enforced in the classroom appropriate to the level. The first two years of German focus on helping students acquire proficiency in basic grammatical structures. As a result, not all features of German grammar are covered during those years—at least not for active production—but are taken up in subsequent courses. Within this framework, faculty members and teaching assistants have leeway to find the teaching style that is most productive for themselves and their students.
Although we recognize that the split between language-acquisition and cultural-content courses is an artificial one, it is a good heuristic device to structure a major curriculum that aspires to produce BAs with functional knowledge of German. Fifteen of the thirty credits that constitute the German major are designated language-acquisition courses (though they also seek to increase students’ cultural competence). The remaining fifteen are fulfilled by taking seminars on German topics. However, only those seminars taught in German count toward the BA. Needless to say, junior-senior seminars taught in the target language have to employ a different pedagogical and didactic approach than seminars taught in English do. Furthermore, even these content-based seminars have to attend to students’ linguistic needs.
Informal polling of the majors by the adviser suggests that undergraduates want to gain a comprehensive understanding of the German-speaking world of today and how it evolved through history. In other words, most undergraduates engaging in advanced study of German language and culture are not primarily interested in the study of German literature qua literature. Students’ interest appears to coincide closely with a broad concept of culture as articulated in a cultural studies approach. Our curriculum has taken account of this preference not only by redesigning the second-year language sequence but also by offering thematically organized courses such as Weimar Culture, Film and Fascism, Peace and Militarism in German Culture, Minorities in Postwar Germany. These courses approach literary texts in terms of the discursive formation that constitutes the theme of the course rather than solely as aesthetic products within the confines of literary history. In addition, we offer courses covering a specific period under the more general heading Literature and Culture from ____ to ____, which enjoy robust enrollments among our undergraduates. Within this period framework instructors can explore a variety of themes and focus on categories such as gender, race and ethnicity, and social class, as well as address formal and aesthetic questions. Enrollment patterns have confirmed that students prefer these courses over pure genre or single-author courses.
More important than any curricular change is the delivery of content. It is ultimately the quality of teaching that retains students in our language classrooms. One requirement is setting attainable standards and ensuring that students experience language studies as progress toward their goal of acquiring a functional knowledge of the target language. Since the first two years of German are taught in large part by our graduate student teaching assistants, it is imperative that they be carefully trained and mentored. As in most other graduate programs, our incoming teaching assistants have to participate in a mandatory teaching workshop before their first day in the classroom. In addition, they have to take a teaching-methods course concurrent with their first year of teaching. Individual faculty members have given graduate students opportunities to teach a unit in the advanced language courses they are teaching and in the junior and senior seminars. This hands-on experience not only provides practical training but also gives graduate students a better sense of the correlation between beginning and advanced language instruction.
The German department has developed a large database of templates for all courses by requiring instructors to submit at least a course description, syllabus, and tests or assignments. This database allows faculty members to find out quickly what a colleague has covered in a previous course or, in other words, what student knowledge they can build on in their own courses. Finally, careful advising by the designated departmental majors’ advisers, who are typically tenured faculty members, has helped us identify promising majors and assist them in taking the best possible course of study with us.
Despite popular belief, the increase of enrollment at the advanced level in our program of language studies has nothing to do with heritage speakers. They no longer exist in German, not even in western Pennsylvania. Both in regional high schools and at the University of Pittsburgh, the Spanish language programs dwarf the rest of the foreign languages. Instead of trying to compete with this dominant foreign language for incoming freshmen, we have focused our attention on providing an excellent learning experience for those students who come with a ready interest in German language and culture.
It is common knowledge that students in professional programs such as the College of Business Administration or the School of Engineering have a strong interest in language. Yet their linguistic and professional needs are only to a limited extent addressed in most upper-division courses in the liberal arts curriculum. The logical conclusion for us was to begin offering content-based instruction in professional areas that we could legitimately cover with our faculty resources. The most obvious is business German, or German for Professional Purposes, as our two-course sequence is called. The former language coordinator was the driving force behind this sequence, which she designed on the third-year level. The enrollment in this sequence averaged fourteen students in two years. Clearly, developing more specialized courses has helped make German language studies attractive to more students across the various schools at the University of Pittsburgh. However, the occasional content-based instruction in business German alone will not suffice to stabilize or increase enrollments.
The professional German sequence was part of a larger programmatic initiative, which heeded the students’ call for a structured language-acquisition program outside the German major. In 1997–98, the German department developed an eighteen-credit German language certificate. Different from the German major, for which only third- and fourth-year courses count, the certificate begins with the second-year language courses and has certainly contributed to higher enrollments on this level. After the second year, students have the choice between two tracks: the professional German track and the liberal arts track. In each track, students have to take two courses on the third-year level and two on the fourth-year level. Students opting for the professional track need to take the two-course professional German sequence as well as the two fourth-year language courses—German Media, an oral-proficiency oriented course, and Structures of German, the capstone grammar course that majors also have to take. Students pursuing the liberal arts track have more choices on the third-year level (among German Writing, Introduction to Literary Reading, and Phonetics). On the fourth-year level, they have to take one junior or senior seminar in addition to one of the two fourth-year language courses.
The German department was able to offer the certificate in German language with its existing resources, that is, without any immediate budgetary effect. Since the certificate was based on already existing courses, except for the two in the professional German sequence, budgetary concerns were a nonissue for approval. However, the increased enrollment in our upper-division language courses has put a strain on our instructional resources, and the German department has to ask now routinely for a part-time budget for a minimum of three courses every academic year.
Though we have not yet compiled precise statistics of how many students select the language certificate, estimates based on graduation numbers for the past three academic years suggest that approximately twenty students are actively pursuing the certificate at any given time. Also indicating the success of this programmatic change is that we can now offer one section of third- and fourth-semester German off sequence and that our advanced language courses are regularly enrolled at capacity, that is, at eighteen to twenty-two students. Furthermore, we can offer two junior-senior seminars taught in German every term and so give our majors more choices.
We also suspect that the certificate in German language has bolstered our number of majors. There is some indication that several current majors continued with their language studies beyond the first or second year because they wanted to complete the language certificate. Since the liberal arts track of the certificate consists of courses that would also count toward the major, students need only four more courses to graduate with a BA in German. In particular, students who pursue language study abroad and can transfer some of these credits toward the certificate find themselves in a position to complete the major with only minimal extra credit.
The initial proposal for the certificate included a pilot project of conducting either ACTFL OPIs or appropriate other outside tests with all certificate students. The tight staffing situation has not allowed us to conduct systematic exit proficiency exams for our majors or certificate students. Nonetheless, because the German department’s curriculum is oral-proficiency driven, two faculty members have been OPI-trained and one has been OPI-certified. As a result, all first- and second-year language courses and the appropriate courses on the advanced level integrate oral examinations based on OPI principles into their testing structure.
The University of Pittsburgh has a long-standing partnership with the University of Augsburg in southern Germany, of which the student-exchange program is an important part. Since 1997, the number of German students who participate in this semester-long direct-enrollment program at the University of Augsburg has doubled. Only about 40% of our majors study abroad, but most of them opt for the Augsburg program. The semester in Augsburg fits into the summer term at the University of Pittsburgh, so that students need not interrupt their studies. They can transfer up to twelve credits from the University of Augsburg toward their BA at no additional tuition cost. At approximately $4,000—the total cost in 2001–02, including flight, room and board, and pocket money for three months—this is one of the cheapest study-abroad possibilities available for our students. A direct-enrollment program, it allows our students to attend lectures and introductory seminars together with their German colleagues.
Our undergraduates who participate in this program in Augsburg come back with significantly improved language skills. We heavily advertise this study-abroad opportunity to students in the lower-level language courses. The German department does not, however, privilege the exchange program with its partner university but encourages and assists students in finding the best program for their linguistic needs.
The German department offers a variety of co-curricular activities, often in cooperation with the student-run German Language Club. These cocurricular activities range from social functions to educational activities and give students the chance to use their German skills outside the classroom. Among the most successful are the weekly Stammtisch at a local coffee house, a career information panel with business professionals who had majored in a foreign language, the annual Kristallnacht commemoration in cooperation with the Jewish studies program at the University of Pittsburgh, and the annual German essay contest. The last has become an important showcase for the achievements of our students, whose winning essays are published in a brochure. Informal polls among our students indicate that students whose achievement in German was recognized in the essay contest were highly likely to continue with their language studies and even pursue the certificate or the major. Recognition of linguistic achievement outside the classroom appears to be a motivating factor for language students.
Because the German department understands the importance of better coordination between high school and college-level language instruction, it offers since 1998 an MA in German with Pennsylvania instructional certification, level 1, in cooperation with the School of Education. The German department delivers the graduate students’ education in the area of culture and offers students practical teaching experience, while the School of Education offers the courses necessary for the instructional certification. The department has proved its commitment to this program by dedicating up to two fully funded teaching assistant slots to attract quality graduate students who plan a career in teaching German at the high school level. Financial support for this program is not only a logistical balancing act but also controversial in the university’s administration, which compares this professional MA track with terminal MAs in other disciplines, especially in the sciences, for which graduate students typically pay the cost themselves. But the strength of enrollment in our advanced-level language courses and in our majors program is in part due to strong German programs in a few suburban high schools that are feeder schools for the university. Funding for this terminal MA degree provides crucial support to the German department. Students from one suburban high school with an advanced placement program in German routinely place into our fourth-semester German course and some even into our third-year college-level courses. The German department has focused outreach efforts on this school and two others, where we have placed recent graduates of our BA program and our new MA in German with Pennsylvania teaching certification.
Spearheaded by the language coordinator, the German department offered one-day conferences for regional German middle and high school teachers. These miniconferences provided information on recent developments in German politics and culture and to a lesser extent on language pedagogy issues. In addition, they gave regional teachers an opportunity to meet one another and—since the presentations were in German—to use their language skills. Some twenty-five teachers attended these conferences.
We try to accommodate high school teachers’ requests for bringing their German students into our college-level German courses, or our majors to their school, and to participate in the schools’ German Day initiatives where possible. Personal contact, which for us has been established through the language coordinator, appears to be critical in developing relations between the language programs in local schools and at the university.
Our program has been successful in increasing interest in the study of German language and culture primarily on the advanced level even under somewhat adverse conditions involving staffing and funding of the department and limitations in technology use. (The University of Pittsburgh did not have a state-of-the-art language learning and resource center with its own director until 2000.) In our experience, the key to success has been the German department’s offerings of a multifaceted program that meets students’ needs on both academic and personal levels and the commitment of all faculty members to the language-teaching mission as an integral part of a liberal arts education.
Sabine von Dirke
Lixl-Purcel, Andreas. Stimmen eines Jahrhunderts, 1888–1990. Boston: Heinle, 1990.
| 1995 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Introductory sequence | 167 | 196 | 192 | 189 | 182 |
| Advanced courses | 34 | 92 | 76 | 112 | 114 |
| Majors | 18 | 30 | 40 | 42 | 48 |
| Full-Time Tenure Track |
Full-Time Non-Tenure Track |
Part-Time | Graduate TAs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 1 | 1 | |
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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