UNC German Grammar Video Series
Funded by a Large Course Redesign Grant from the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Second semester German can be very demanding for students as they work to transition from the beginning language level to the intermediate language level. As a result, both instructors and students can feel overwhelmed by the amount of grammatical material being covered in the course. This project aims at alleviating some of that stress by employing techniques of the flipped classroom to help students take the lead in their own learning.
When teaching second semester German, it was clear that many students were unfamiliar with much of the basic terminology used to describe grammatical structures. Contemporary research in foreign language pedagogy shows that speaking German as much as possible in class is beneficial for student learning (see, for example, ACTFL’s official recommendationson this subject: https://www.actfl.org/news/position-statements/use-the-target-language-the-classroom). However, at the beginning language level students do not have the listening comprehension skills to grasp complex grammatical concepts in German. This video project intends to give students the resources they need to understand grammatical concepts, without requiring digressions from German language and cultural content during class.
My colleagues (Dr. Christina Weiler and Dr. Kyung Lee Gagum) and I have created 18 videos (5-10 minutes long) on the following topics: Noun Case Overview, Dative Case, Genitive Case, Adjective Endings, Modal Verbs, the Narrative Past Tense, the Conversational Past Tense, Future Tense, Passive Voice, the Subjunctive Mood, Imperative, Reflexive Verbs, Relative Clauses, Comparative and Superlative, Two-Way Prepositions, Conjunctions, Time Expressions, and Articles.
The password for watching the sample videos below is: germangrammarvids
More of the videos are also available here.
When teaching second semester German, it was clear that many students were unfamiliar with much of the basic terminology used to describe grammatical structures. Contemporary research in foreign language pedagogy shows that speaking German as much as possible in class is beneficial for student learning (see, for example, ACTFL’s official recommendationson this subject: https://www.actfl.org/news/position-statements/use-the-target-language-the-classroom). However, at the beginning language level students do not have the listening comprehension skills to grasp complex grammatical concepts in German. This video project intends to give students the resources they need to understand grammatical concepts, without requiring digressions from German language and cultural content during class.
My colleagues (Dr. Christina Weiler and Dr. Kyung Lee Gagum) and I have created 18 videos (5-10 minutes long) on the following topics: Noun Case Overview, Dative Case, Genitive Case, Adjective Endings, Modal Verbs, the Narrative Past Tense, the Conversational Past Tense, Future Tense, Passive Voice, the Subjunctive Mood, Imperative, Reflexive Verbs, Relative Clauses, Comparative and Superlative, Two-Way Prepositions, Conjunctions, Time Expressions, and Articles.
The password for watching the sample videos below is: germangrammarvids
More of the videos are also available here.