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Date: Nov. 21, 1996
Virtual Cheesecake, Eggs and
Bananas for Beginning German
Princeton, N.J.--Your assignment: Go shopping forKäsekuchen, Eier, Bananen . No problem. That shopping list is one of the computer assignments for German 101, Beginner's German. And thanks to interactive software developed by Senior Lecturer in German Jamie Rankin, who teaches the course, students will come to class with virtual cheesecake, eggs and bananas.
Here's how it works. On computers in the Jones Hall Language Lab, students see a map of a German village indicating the location of various shops. A click takes students to a bakery, for example, in search of their cheesecake. At the Bäckerei Schmidt they are greeted by a video featuring Princeton graduate student Talia Block touting the freshness of Schmidt's Käsekuchen and warning them against the stale goods at "the other bakery." Should they nonetheless be tempted to investigate that other bakery--the Bäckerei Müller--a click will let them see and hear Geoffrey Atherton (who earned his MA at Princeton in 1991) as a Bäckerei Müller employee, warning them against the second-rate baked goods at Schmidt's. After deciding which bakery to patronize, students return to the center of town for another foray into the virtual marketplace in search of eggs and bananas.
Students can repeat any part of the experience as often as they wish. Thanks to the Aussprache element in each lesson, says Melinda Hwang '99, "I only need to click on the computer screen to hear a word, sentence or complete dialogue repeated as many times as I want." Observes Kimberly Allen '97, "The computer lessons allow students to move at their own speed, making sure they've mastered a pronunciation or translation."
And it doesn't hurt that each assignment provides entertainment as well as enlightenment--the product of what Len Teti '99 calls "Professor Rankin's own brand of comic wit."
Rankin has designed the program specifically to complement the class textbook, Wie geht's? (How's It Going? by Sevin, Sevin and Bean, 1995). Each computer assignment uses the vocabulary and grammatical structures of the chapter under study, allowing students, says Rankin, "to hear other speakers than their own preceptor" and providing them with "visual information that increases their understanding of German culture. The computer assignments are an adjunct to, an enhancement of what we do in class, where students are able to practice spoken German."
Meaning-based learning
Traditional language learning, says Rankin, "relies on repetition and drills: 'Repeat this sentence.' And people do repeat, often without understanding the sentence at all. The way such drills are constructed, it's possible to complete an exercise 'successfully' without having understood a word."
Rankin prefers "meaning-based learning." For example, "If you listen to five people talk about a restaurant and then have to figure out whether they liked it or not, you're listening for content, for information. You're using language as language is normally used--not just repeating sounds as an exercise."
So Rankin set out to improve upon the audiocassettes previously used in German 101, which were judged "boring" and "unhelpful" by the instructor as well as by students. His goal was interactive computer software that would link text, pictures, sound and video to enhance student understanding and enjoyment and that would be keyed to the textbook "so the vocabulary and grammar would be familiar."
With no previous computer experience ("I had only used wordprocessing and e-mail"), Rankin applied to the Princeton Language Consortium, a campus resource that funds curriculum development in foreign languages. With the resultant award, he upgraded his office computer and purchased software that would enable him to write programs.
"I thought, in my naiveté, you could just throw things together," he says. "The project turned out to be a lot more labor-intensive than I expected."
He credits CIT's David Herrington and Paula Hulick, both technical staff members in Information Services, with guiding him along the path from idea to reality. "I had to learn every step," he says. "I learned how to digitize pictures, video and sounds."
He discovered that "the technical expertise, the ability to maniplate a program to make everything work," was only the beginning. More important, he points out, is the concept: "What kinds of activities are you going to use to teach the chapter? What materials do you need to make that activity work?"
For example, one of three activities related to a chapter on housing and furniture gives students the following assignment: "You are a student, you have to rent a small furnished apartment near the university and you can afford up to 500 Marks." On the computer, the student finds three classified ads, each with a phone number listed. They call the numbers and hear someone answering the phone, repeating some of the information in the ad and giving additional information about the apartment in question. "You have to listen and think, 'Is this what I want?'" says Rankin. "And only one of the classified ads follows the assignment scenario."
To make such an activity available on screen, Rankin has to gather the materials--for instance, search magazines for photos of apartments and has to scan the pictures. He must create scripts for the telephone respondents and record various native speakers (often members of his department) into his computer for subsequent digitization. If the activity includes video clips, he shoots and digitizes the video. Then, using SuperCard software, he creates each page of the program, including links to other pages--links that, for example, let the student make the phone calls to the ads or hear a previous call again. Once constructed, the segments are installed on the hard drives of the Jones Hall computers.
Sound like a lot of work? It is. So much that Rankin has so far created the computer assignments for four of the textbook's 16 chapters. He hopes to have eight done by the end of this academic year.
Ways of language acquisition
A 1996 winner of one of the President's Distinguished Teaching Awards, Rankin says that his desire to "improve language teaching" derives from his own experience as a nascent German scholar.
"I started German in college," he says. "I loved the language and did well in the first-year course. But when I visited Germany the following summer, I discovered I could neither speak nor understand. I realized that learning rules about a language is not the same thing as learning a language."
So began "an odyssey of sorts, looking into different ways of language acquisition." After earning a PhD in Germanic languages and literatures at Harvard in 1985, Rankin taught at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and did postdoctoral study in second language acquisition at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. At Princeton since 1991, he also teaches intermediate German and a course for graduate student assistants in instruction on second language acquisition and teaching methodology.
The computer assignments, along with Rankin's classes, have earned German 101 the ultimate undergraduate accolade: "Well worth getting up for at 8:00 o'clock five days a week."