Pedagogy

Antiracist Curriculum Working Group

The Antiracist Curriculum Working Group (ARCWG) was formed in the German Department at Penn State in June 2020. Our goal is to decenter our basic German language sequence by integrating antiracist pedagogy with the department’s existing communicative approach to foreign language teaching in our classrooms. Following Blakeney (2005)[1], we define antiracist pedagogy as that which targets the revelation of societal structures that have systematically contributed to the oppression of members of society–based on their identity markers, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, socioeconomic class, language variety/dialect, immigration status, and/or educational level.

Project-based Learning

Project-based learning (PBL) is a pedagogical approach that is grounded in the principles of active construction of meaning, situated learning, and social interaction. Key characteristics are the “project” as unit of instruction, emphasis on tangible artifacts as the outcome of the instructional unit, guiding questions/problems that are situated in authentic contexts, and rich opportunities for student-student and instructor-student collaboration. So far this collaborative project includes the curriculum for an advanced German writing course, a pedagogical report on the course development process, and a workshop on the use of PBL in the foreign language classroom.

Semantic Feature Training for L2 Vocabulary

This ongoing project consists of a series of studies on the use of semantic feature analysis techniques for learning vocabulary in a second language (L2). Traditionally, semantic feature analysis is a treatment technique used to improve word retrieval ability in people with aphasia or other acquired language disorders. It involves generating semantic features, or descriptors, for the target words (Boyle, 2010). [1] The studies conducted so far have investigated one-on-one training of abstract words in L2 English and L2 Spanish (Sandberg et al.