The following curriculum supplement is designed to be used in concert with the North Carolina Standard Course of Study for Second Language Studies. That document encompasses all the second languages taught in North Carolina public schools (except for Latin, which has its own Standard Course of Study), whereas this supplement describes discrete grammatical and communicative functions which should be covered in a high-school German Level 3 course. The dates given below apply to Southern Durham High School's four-by-four (4 X 4) block scheduling plan. In this plan, the student, by taking 90 minutes of German per school day, covers the complete German 3 curriculum in one semester. Traditonal schedules of 1-hour periods take one school year to cover the German 3 curriculum.
There are two components to the supplement: Communicative Topics and Communicative Structures. The premise is that if we give students the opportunity to use foreign language input in natural communicative spheres, their levels of motivation to learn the language will rise. By coupling this communicative approach with concise structural lessons on the German language itself, the teacher can begin to immerse the student in a modern foreign language without sacrificing accuracy and fluency in the language and without succumbing to a didactic audio-lingual methodology that is at odds with current research on how people learn languages.
Computer technology continues to make in-roads into foreign language instruction. The World Wide Web grows daily, and more and more educators are finding innovative ways to integrate computer technology into day-to-day instructional practice. The author of this curriculum supplement, for example, has begun an Online Exchange with a partner school in Germany. Students write homepages, post them on the WWW and invite fellow students from around the world to visit the pages to comment on what they have read. It is one of several interesting approaches to utilizing technology, both for its own sake and as a way to motivate students to express themselves in unique and original ways. Computer technology is not a major component per se of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. Its successful inclusion into any curriculum depends entirely on the skill level and the creativity of the teacher. Computers are yet another tool that teachers can utilize to implement and enhance an already established curriculum.