Learning Goals in the German Studies Major

The major in German Studies cultivates in its students a deep engagement with their environment organized around three concentric concentrations: language competence, cultural competence, and critical competence. These are not sequential stages but simultaneous aspects of our broad-based educational program within the framework of the liberal arts.

Language Competence

On completion of the major, students will attain the “intermediate-mid” level of spoken competence according to the standards published by the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). At this level, a speaker can initiate conversation and carry out basic communicative tasks in various familiar social situations. Intermediate speakers can negotiate everyday transactions effectively without recourse to English, and travel confidently throughout the German-speaking world. Student’s comprehension and reading skills will be generally higher than their spoken level, including the ability to read newspapers and magazines as well as shorter fiction.

Cultural Competence

Advanced linguistic fluency involves more than just grammatical and lexical competence. The advance registers of a language require correct usage within a variety of social and cultural contexts. This dimension of learning we call “cultural competence.” The major in German Studies organizes cultural competence around a series of cultural keystones. These keystones are distributed throughout the German Studies curriculum. Students learn to identify and examine the fundamental forces that have shaped German Culture, ranging from historical events and individuals, to political concepts and forms of social organization, to major literary, artistic, and philosophical trends.

Critical Competence

Critical competence comes from understanding how culture both shapes and is shaped by the values it produces and enforces. Critical competence is, in the first instance, the ability to analyze and evaluate critically the ways in which the foreign culture’s texts, symbols, events, and institutions occur in debates and controversies that generate its identity and values. At the same time, critical competence is also the cross-cultural application of these analytical skills to evaluate the values of one’s own culture as they emerge in their differences from the foreign culture one studies. While this is the goal of all our more advanced courses, students achieve this personally and pragmatically through a period of immersion and intellectually through an independent study or a senior dissertation. The major in German Studies, offers students various paths to cultivate linguistic, cultural, and critical competence, in pursuit of this goal and in fashioning themselves into independent-minded, engaged, and intelligent adults in the 21st century.