German
305-0-20: Writing as Discovery: Comm Correctly, Clearly & Persuasively :

Instructor: Franziska Lys
Office address: Crowe Hall 2-101 Evanston Campus 2203
Phone: 847-491-8298
E-mail: flys@northwestern.edu
Office Hours:
Instructor home page

Expected Enrollment: 18

COURSE DESCRIPTION: The advanced writing course has two components. First, through a series of linguistic exercises, students are introduced to more advanced and sophisticated structures of written German. This happens in two stages: Most initial grammar points to be reviewed are taken from the actual writings of each student to insure that points are practiced that correspond to the weaknesses of the individual student. For the second stage, a variety of current short texts (current texts from newspapers and magazines as well as fictional works by German-speaking authors) serve as a basis for writing exercises and other assignments that build on the first stage. For example, if students have particular problems with adjective endings, we will quickly review them. We will then continue discussing adjective endings with plural expressions such as viele (many), mehrere (several), and einige (some); we will cover adjectival use of present and past participles; and then move on to extended adjectival modifiers.

The second component in this class gives students a chance to work on a longer piece of writing over the nine weeks of the quarter. The goals for the writing component of the course are threefold: a) students produce a large amount of high quality writing while constantly revising, rereading, adjusting; b) students get involved in research by working on topics they would not have been interested in before, simply because it concerns the person they are writing about; c) students share their work throughout the quarter with their class peers, their teacher and their mentor outside of class. The task-based nature of the project teaches students skills that are important beyond linguistic and cultural skills: interpersonal skills, organizational skills, perseverance and patience, creativity, and clarity of presentation and expression.

PREREQUISITES: High Intermediate skills in reading, writing, and speaking.

TEACHING METHOD: • Presentation and discussion of grammar points
• Written drills in class with some oral work
• Weekly writing assignments.

EVALUATION METHOD: Class participation is very important. The workload of this class is not excessive, but you need to keep up with weekly.
• Attendance and preparedness for each class (15%)
• Weekly writing assignments and other homework (30%)
• Regular grammar quizzes (in-class and/or take-home quizzes) (30%)
• Final version of writing project (25%)

READING: • Xeroxed copies will be handed out by the instructor. Please purchase a ring binder to organize your material.
• Any good dictionary. If you do not have a good dictionary available and consider buying one, ask your instructor.

[Course Descriptions for Spring 2009] [Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences] [GERMAN German]