Exploring the use of anchored instruction in intermediate level German foreign language education
Year: 2005
Type: dissertation
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: This study investigates the benefits of implementing content-based instruction \n(CBI) and culturally authentic film in intermediate level (IL) foreign language (FL) \ncourses to promote increased knowledge of target language and culture. The premise of \nthe study is that contextualizing FL instruction at the IL using authentic film will enable \nstudents to improve their knowledge of the target language and culture, learn to view film \nas a rich source of information, improve their critical thinking skills, and develop skills \nthat will allow them to continue learning outside of the classroom. \nThe participants consisted of third semester students of German. They received \ntraining in describing and analyzing film set in pre-WWII Germany by working with a \nframework for recording important social, technological, economic, political, scientific \nand geographic features present in film, as well as by answering basic questions about \nplot and characters. In addition, a small group of Germanic Studies graduate students \ncompleted the same pre- and posttest assessment activities and served as a comparison \ngroup. \nIn a pre- and posttest assessment, participants were asked to summarize the \ncontents of film clips set in pre-WWII Germany. The graduate students’ summaries were \nused to create a ‘master summary of the contents of each film. Explicit, factual \ninformation was analyzed by counting the number of explicit ideas (propositions) \ngenerated by each individual. The data revealed that both the experts and IL students \ndecreased in the number of propositions they generated in the posttest, but the IL students \nimproved significantly in terms of the proportion of propositions they included from the \nmaster summary. However, they did not improve in their ability to include propositions \nusing only German. \nOther types of information were analyzed qualitatively using discourse analysis. \nBoth the graduate ‘experts’ and IL students included much inferential knowledge in their \nsummaries, and some intermediate level students also included meta comments that \naddressed their ability to complete the summary task using German. The study revealed \nthat integrating authentic film in IL classrooms using a CBI approach assists FL students \nin increasing their ability to summarize events seen in culturally authentic film.
Author: Tina Marie Deveny Oestreich
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1704897675