PSU First-Year German keys on the Proficiency Guidelines of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Our course implements the Guidelines not just in general goals, but right down to the design of the learning materials and the activities. All professional language educators can be assumed to be familiar with the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Students and advisors may wish to consult them by going to the ACTFL site. Here is an abbreviated version.

Here are the chief features of that organizing principle:

1) The classroom emphasizes speaking in a real-world context,
2) The grammar content of the course is expressed in non-technical language and the quantity of grammar is more realistic than that of most textbooks. The "grammatical ceiling" tops off at the ACTFL Advanced level.
3) The cultural content is approached in an "anthropological" manner, rather than a "Capital-C" manner: emphasis is on everyday life, not highbrow literature, arts, history, etc. (although the customized projects allow for those interests).
4) Target exit proficiencies (end of first year, i.e., GER 101/102/103, 12 quarter-course hours of credit) are speaking at Intermediate-mid and writing at Intermediate-low, or the other way around.
5) Reading focuses on practical skills, not extended texts; thus a lot of attention to menus, signs, schedules, and short paragraphs such as those found on city tours, historical signs, etc.
6) The course uses lots of authentic media, but those of the everyday world rather than the elite culture.
7) Tests and grades are based on evaluations of your practical use of German, NOT your "academic" knowledge of its grammar or your ability to do mechanical drills. In simpler words, if you do well in our course (B or better), you will acquire the ability to handle everyday situations (food, shelter, transportation, personal info, basic cultural info). You would be able to land in a German-speaking environment and manage for an indefinite stay, as long as you encountered no major complications or the need for advanced capabilities, such as getting a job, renting an apartment, or handling a serious illness.

A key question, though, is whether subsequent courses you might take would articulate properly with our courses. If those courses demand a detailed "intellectual" understanding of German grammar and the related terminology, there could be difficulties (although our package also includes an extensive Reference Grammar). It should be noted, though, that students who acquire that grammar knowledge are not necessarily able to use it for practical purposes.

Our course uses Wie, bitte? Introductory German for Proficiency, a software package produced at PSU and in use for many years now (with updates, of course). The Wie, bitte? package is distributed on disk in class and also available as a download. In its content it is the full equivalent of an ink-on-paper textbook, but it is superior to printed books in the wealth of its authentic media, both graphics and audio, and in the way that the media content is linked to the textual content. For example, to hear a dialog you just click on the text, and when you see a list of vocabulary words you can click on the words to explore graphic and audio media that illustrate the words.

• Supplemental software resources are available, also for free, at:

http://www.cosmolingua.pdx.edu/

They run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You're welcome to keep and use the software resources whether or not you take our course. You also may pass Wie, bitte? and the supplemental resources on to others, either by showing them the links or by copying the files themselves.

The course is NOT online, though. Human-human communication is its heart and soul, and we don't do "drill-and-kill" activities with a machine scoring the victims.

If you go back to the "schedule" listing and then click on "101", "102", "103", you (or your advisor) can examine the assignments, tests, and projects, including most of the scoring guides. Some of the activities also come with actual student work samples, including the scores and grades for them. Our customized projects might interest both you and your advisor, as indications of what students in our program can actually do with the language. Toward the end of the first-year sequence they do "German and My Education & Career", which provides a portfolio-like documentation of how they have encountered a basic specialized vocabulary for their field and have explored resources for exploring it more in the German-speaking world.