Dr. Jens-Uwe Guettel has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for his book project on Radical Democracy in Germany, 1871-1923.

German Ph.D. candidate Valérie Keppenne has received a Language Learning Dissertation Grant to fund parts of her dissertation project "When predictions aren't Perfekt: The joint role of prediction, corrective feedback and prediction error in L2 learning". The research investigates the complementary roles of prediction, feedback, and prediction error, and their potential to impact L2 grammar learning, as well as the developmental trajectory of how learners process feedback and compute prediction error in real time during learning. The project unites classroom-based research on corrective feedback with psycholinguistic research on predictive processing and has the protentional to advance our understanding of the underlying learning mechanisms in late second language acquisition. In addition, it has implications at the pedagogical level, for instance for designing effective language learning materials.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day to remember and honor the lives of the 6 million Jewish victims and over 11 million other victims of the Holocaust.  In the era of COVID-19, Holocaust memorials, museums, and foundations across the world are offering virtual tours and open houses to explore their collections, in addition to compiling resources for combating Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.  See the links below to find out more.

Online Holocaust Remembrance Events:

• 10:00 a.m. EST, Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum’s commemoration event: http://auschwitz.org/en/home-page-76/

• 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. EST, United Nations, virtual memory ceremony and rouble-table discussion: http://webtv.un.org/

• 1:00 - 1:30 p.m. EST, 2021 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Remembrance Commemoration:

https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/veintlremday0121

• 8:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. EST, Museum of Jewish Heritage, “18 Voices: A Liberation Day Reading of Young Writers’ Diaries from the Holocaust”:

https://898a.blackbaudhosting.com/898a/36-Voices-Registrations?_ga=2.179546016.520996772.1609874241-341923603.1598905598

Virtual Tours and Resources (alphabetical order):

• Anne Frank House online visits: https://www.annefrank.org/en/museum/web-and-digital/ 

• Debunking Holocaust denial: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/how-to-refute-holocaust-denial

• Jewish Virtual Library’s articles on Anti-Semitism: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-semitism 

• Jüdisches Museum Berlin’s online showcase: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/online-projects

• Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas online exhibitions: https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/exhibitions/ 

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum virtual tour: https://www.ushmm.org/teach/teaching-materials/primary-sources-collections/virtual-field-trip/virtual-tour-for-students

• Yad Vashem, online exhibitions: https://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions.html

Congratulations to Carrie Jackson, Professor of German and Linguistics, is the recipient of the 2020 Outstanding Faculty Adviser Award. Dr. Jackson maintains very consistent and excellent ratings in teaching, but perhaps even more impressive are her extensive contributions to undergraduate student success outside the classroom. She has advised four undergraduate honors theses and an undergraduate internship. There are, in addition, the many other undergraduate students whose work she has supervised outside the classroom, including five undergraduates whom she assisted with their funded research projects, and the many research assistants who have worked in her lab. She is fully dedicated to enriching the lives of students.

FALL 2020 General Education Courses to Focus on Central European Culture, History, and Politics

GER 190, Section 1: Twentieth Century German Literature in Translation
Narratives of Injustice

   Historically, the twentieth century was a very turbulent century for Germany. It was a century of extreme violence, as witnessed by the years 1914 and 1939 with the outbreak of the First World War and the unleashing of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It was also a century of revolutions: the revolutionary autumn in 1918 and the establishment of Germany's first democracy, the Weimar Republic; and the peaceful revolution of the late 1980s that led to the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of a country that had been divided into East and West as a result of its defeat during WWII.
   In this class, we seek to understand those complex histories through the lens of major works of literature and film that feature social injustice, e.g., racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. Sadly, and unjustifiably, some of these works, e.g., Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, a bestseller in the 1930s that not only made it to the screen, but won the Academy Award in 1932; or Verena Stefan's Shedding, which became arguably the most influential novel for the German feminist movement of the 1970s/1980s, fell into oblivion. Yet, all of the works offer not only an intriguing and important perspective on the time of their origin, but a relevant lesson for readers/viewers in the present.
   We will examine the uniquely German experience of the 20th century by situating these works into their socio-political context, but we will show their relevance and use them to discuss social injustice as a global and timeless phenomenon by tying them to political debates of the 21st century.

Course #: 19764

For his translation of an excerpt from Dilek Güngör’s Ich bin Özlem (Verbrecher Verlag, 2019), the winner of the tenth annual Gutekunst Prize of the Friends of Goethe New York is Duncan Lien. Congratulations!

The jury, comprised of Tess Lewis, book critic and translator, Alta Price, Translator, and Jeremy Davies, editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, stated:
 

Lien wrote the following on his experience of translating Güngör’s text:
 

          
You can read Duncan Lien's prizewinning translation of an excerpt from Dilek Güngör’s Ich bin Özlem here:

https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf198/2020-gutekunst-prize-of-the-friends-of-new-york-translation.pdf

German and Russian majors, minors, and outstanding students will be honored at an online ceremony to be held on 22 April, from 5-7p.m. For information, updates, and the eventual link, bookmark:https://sites.psu.edu/awardsandgraduation2020/

The Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures and the University Park Allocation Committee will co-sponsor an invited talk and interactive workshop by Dr. Lara Bryfonski (Georgetown University) on task-based language teaching. Light refreshments will be served.  RSVP here!

Invited Talk: Task-Based Language Teaching: Current Trends and Future Directions

Friday, March 20, 2020
3:00 - 4:00 p.m.
167 Willard Building

The talk will explore some of the foundational theories of TBLTand highlight current trends and challenges. The talk will begin with an introduction to the various frameworks proposed for organizing task-based education and an overview of the main components of a TBLTprogram. Next, Dr. Bryfonski will present on recent research investigating the role of teachers and teacher training in the TBLT implementation process, including the results of recent program-level implementations and meta analytic findings. The talk will end with a discussion of the challenges in translating TBLT research findings to diverse pedagogical contexts.

Interactive Workshop: Task-Based Language Teaching

Saturday, March 21, 2020
9:30 a.m. - Noon
167 Willard Building

While traditional approaches to language instruction organize syllabi and curricula around grammar points, task-based language teaching (TBLT) utilizes authentic tasks driven by the needs of the learners, and resulting linguistic forms, as the units of instruction (Long, 1985, 2015). The aim of TBLT pedagogy is to provide students with the linguistic skills they need to engage in meaningful interactions outside the classroom. This hands-on, interactive workshop is designed to provide language teachers and researchers at Penn State the opportunity to apply concepts from TBLT to their own teaching or research domains.

This course will investigate representations of ethnic minorities and cultural “others” in Soviet and post-communist Russian cinema and will examine the relationship between film and Marxist-Leninist politics, the Communist International, dissident culture, and Russia’s search for its new post-Soviet identity. The main focus of the course will be on such cinematic legends as Vertov, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Aleksandrov, Kalatozov, Parajanov, Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov, and Loznitsa. Students will come away with techniques in film analysis and a deepened understanding of the relationship between society and film in the context of one of the most fascinating signposts of the twentieth century. 

The course is taught in English, fulfills the General Arts, Humanities, and Interdomain requirements, and is designated as an International Cultures course.

For more information, contact Dr. Ladygina at yvladygina@psu.edu