Mrs Doris Hermann-Ostrowski

All students welcome but they should: demonstrate commitment to regular attendance, completion of homework and all assessments; dedicate at least two hours per week for coursework in addition to classes. Students are not expected to be experienced language learners.

Course Aim:

• To develop the ability to use German effectively for purposes of practical communication at a basic level in familiar domestic, work and social contexts.
• To establish the skills, language and attitudes required to promote and facilitate further study of German. To acquire basic literacy.
• To master the pronunciation of German sounds.
• To have basic knowledge of grammatical gender, word-formation, word-order in the sentence.
• To deal with a range of predictable simple language tasks using a limited range of language to meet the needs of differing but familiar situations and topics.
• To familiarise students with the background to German speaking countries, including culture and civil societies.
• To bring students to level A1 CEFR.

Communicative Content:

• Asking for and giving personal information, directions and opinions.
• Describing people, objects, feelings and places.
• Talking about likes and dislikes, expressing preferences and making comparisons.
• Talking about actions.
• Expressing intentions, ignorance and proposing alternatives.
• Expressing frequency.
• Talking about past events and experiences.
• Talking about habitual actions in the past.
• Talking about festive events, invitations, plans.
• Asking for and giving advice.

Structural Content: Introducing the basics of German in the following areas:

• Grammatical gender and plural of nouns.
• Present tense of regular, modal and some irregular/strong verbs.
• Direct and indirect objects; complements.
• Possessive pronouns.
• Prepositions taking the dative and/or accusative case.
• Present perfect of regular and irregular/strong verbs.
• Frequency adverbs; numbers.
• Combining of Perfect and Präteritum.
• Expressions of time.
• All three forms of the imperative.
• Introduction to subordinate clauses.

16 hours of classes in the MT. 22 hours of classes in the LT. 2 hours of classes in the ST.

This is a 40 hour-course. Please refer to the LSE timetable for course teaching arrangements.

• Schritte International, Kursbuch and Arbeitsbuch (Hueber) 2008, ISBN: 9783190018512 and Glossary XXL ISBN: 9783194518513.
• Klipp und Klar, Übungsgrammatik Grundstufe Deutsch mit Lösungen, C Fandrych and U.Tallowitz, (Klett) 2008, ISBN: 9783126753227.

Continuous assessment (50%) in the MT and LT.
Oral examination (30%) and in class assessment (20%) in the LT.