Comparison of High School and College Instruction
submitted by Maureen Helinski

 

Length of instruction

College One Semester = 46 class periods (50 min -3x week)  Aug 26-Dec 10

High School ½ year = 90 class periods (55 min-5 x week)

 Conclusion: One year of high school has 4 times as much meeting time as one semester of college.

Thus high school students can learn and internalize the foreign language structures easier because they have more time to use the language. True high school students can be silly and not motivated but the mere fact that they have four times as much time on task means they can learn much more vocabulary and practice using this. (TPRS shows this)

In 4-5 years of high school a student can achieve a speaking fluency with correct pronunciation that a similar college student could not learn in 2-3 years.

Methods of Instruction

College

 Thus colleges cannot imitate high school methods, they have a limited amount of time to work with. What can colleges do?

1. Recognize the wealth of vocabulary that the high school student brings with him even if he can’t use the Dative Case  properly.

2. Review the fundamentals of the grammar. (High School students are taught structures and often very little grammar) But don’t kill the enthusiasm with endless drills of adjective endings and exceptions to the rule.

3. Do longer readings for fluency, but not philosophical works where the students have to look up every other word.

4. Polish the writing style by assigning regular writing tasks which build on what the students know, while practicing the more complicated sentence structures.

5. Build on the speaking proficiency started in high school. (If a student begins the college class without any previous German he can still learn quickly based on his French or Spanish background)

 The article in Unterrichtspraxis says students continue German in college because “they loved the experience of German in high school.” This means the felt successful. This feeling of success is important in the college class.

High School

What should continuing high school students should bring to college classes?

1. Knowledge of basic vocabulary and the ability to use it.

2. The ability to use correct verb endings in present tense

3. The ability to use the Perfekt tense to talk about the past.

4. The ability to use correct word order in simple and complex sentences.

5. The genders of some basic words.

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