Are you a teacher of German and are often asked by your students to provide more exercises or other study materials?
Are you a student who is not
satisfied with the few exercises you find in your ‘Arbeitsbuch’ but does
not know where to find other material quickly?
Study Paths are now being made for both of you! We hope you find them as useful as our European Studies students do.
Study Paths are reference lists which help students to organise self-access learning effectively. At a glance, you can find material which is both thematically related and of roughly the same grammatical and lexical degree of difficulty as your classroom activities. Throughout the entire GRUNDSTUFE of learning German as a Foreign Language, Study Paths accompany each lesson and direct you to additional, appropriate study material.
The electronic Study Paths do not give you the material itself - this is not possible for copyright reasons. But they direct you to the right spot in your institution’s library or self-access learning centre. Grab the book, insert the video/audio tape or check the software we indicate to you to! If it is not there, ask your librarians to acquire it for you. Refer them to this Study Path system if they ask you why! The full reference of each book or other material is given in the Index.
The Study Path system is constructed along the progression of THEMEN neu, vols. 1- 3 (Aufderstrasse 1992 - 95). This standard textbook was selected because of its world-wide distribution and because it prepares students quite specifically for the Zertifikat Deutsch als Fremdsprache. It corresponds very closely to the curriculum of the European Studies course by a teaching / learning progression based on a functional / notional syllabus and an intricate linkage between explicit (grammar) and area-specific 'world-knowledge' ('Landeskunde'). Even if your course uses a different textbook, you will find the Study Paths useful - course outlines for the elementary and lower-intermediate level are not so different from each other.
In the Study Paths, self-study materials are correlated with
each THEMEN neu’s 30 topics ('Themen') and the corresponding grammar /
vocabulary. You can select among various media formats such as computer
software, listening or viewing (video) exercises, reading and writing materials.
By being listed under a unified topic at a specified teaching / learning
stage, the various materials automatically become linked among each other,
and you may follow up either topic or grammar according to your preferred
media choice. It is also very helpful to go back once in a while and
revise topics/grammar that you have previously learned.
A Note to Teachers - and an Invitation to Collaborate with Us
The objective the Study Paths is to provide an extensive system of learning opportunities which students can choose from according to their own needs and preferences - while always being assured that each item selected would correspond to their particular level of acquisition reached. We wanted to avoid that so many good textbooks for German end up gathering dust on library shelves - simply because they do not ‘fit in’ with the course’s main textbook or because students do not know how and when to use them to their advantage.
Once in place, our students have found the Study Path system extremely helpful and make extensive use of it whenever they enter our Self-Access-Learning-Unit (SALU). Because of the systematicity, the students can work through a far larger number of exercises than they would have if they had been required to browse (search) before focusing on practice (exercises). We teachers found that interest in both language and German-speaking countries is enormously boosted by the convenient access to such a broad range of information/exercises!
However, the preparation of Study Paths is an enourmously time-consuming endeavour. It entails:
Therefore, it makes sense to collaborate in the expansion of the Study Paths.
We invite you here to make full use of the system within your own learning environment. But we would be very pleased if you could, in turn, provide us with further references which you think are suitable at each step of the progression. We are sure that ‘out there’ hundreds of teachers are an invaluable source of information and knowhow. Why should each one of us toil in isolation?
Please send us the information by e-mail.
Upon confirmation, we will feed the references into the web-site. Please
mention the Study Path the material is referred to and give the
full bibliographical reference. If you give us permission, we will list
you by name as a contributor to the system.
A Note to Publishers
The Study Path system does not display any materials which are copyrighted. It is restricted to providing references only. Students and teachers must legally purchase the material if they want to make use of it. The more often your textbooks or other materials appear in the Study Paths, the more likely it is that interested institutions will acquire them. The authors of this page are not responsible for any misuse of the Study Path system by third parties.