Marcella Rollmann

I. LANGUAGE TEACHING

Since the beginning of my teaching career during the A-LM era of the '60s, several significant shifts in foreign language acquisition theory have occurred. To what extent have these changes in theory translated into changes in what we do in our classrooms or what goes into our textbooks?

My interest in this area has led me to trace the changes in and interrelationships between a) language acquisition theory; b) teaching methodology; c) classroom activities; and d) textbooks. Here are some of my presentations and publications in these areas:

PRESENTATIONS:

"Maximizing Language Acquisition on a Four-Week Study-Abroad Program." American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Annual Convention and World Languages Expo. San Diego. 20 November 2009.

"Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills in a Distance Education Course for Beginning German." ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Annual Meeting 2007. San Antonio, November 2007.

"A Comparison of Speaking Activities in Beginning German Classes Taught In and Outside Germany Based on Classroom Observations," in the session "Maintaining Professional Growth Through Action Research." AATG at AATG/ACTFL 2006 (Joint Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of German and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages). Nashville, November 2006.

"Cultural Misunderstandings Gleaned from Student Journals on Study Abroad Trips: Students Learning from Students," in the session "Building a Dynamic Learning Environment for Cultural Literacy." ACTFL at AATG/ACTFL 2006 (Joint Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of German and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages). Nashville, November 2006.

"Internationalizing the Curriculum with German for Distance Education Students." Atlantic Universities' Teaching Showcase: From Vision to Voice: The New Story of Teaching and Learning. Memorial University, October 2006.

"The Winning Team of Technology and Travel: Using Technology to Prepare for Study Abroad." IALLT (International Association of Language Learning Technology) Annual Meeting. University of Michigan, June 2003.

"Intermediate German Web Courses with Study-abroad Component." AATG/ACTFL 2000 (Joint Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of German and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages). Boston, November 2000.

"Solving Problems with On-line Tutorials." NEALL (North East Association of Language Learning Technology) Annual Meeting. Hamilton College, New York, March 1999.

"Maximizing Student Access with On-line Tutorials." Web Days '98, Faculty Seminar, School of Continuing Education, Memorial University, November 12, 1998.

"Enhancing On-Campus Learning Using On-line Resources." Faculty Seminar, Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University, March 6, 1998.

"Using Computers to Teach." Faculty Seminar, School of Continuing Education, Memorial University, February 10, 1998.

"The Internet and the World Wide Web as Means of Allowing Students to Immerse Themselves in the German Language." CAUTG Annual Meeting, St. John's, May 30, 1997.

"Teaching Students to Use the Web for Assignments." Faculty of Arts Workshop: Computers and Teaching in Plain English, Memorial University, March 26, 1997.

"How Communicative Are Our Foreign Language Classes? An International Collaborative Research Project." ACTFL '96 (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Annual Meeting). Philadelphia, November 1996.

[This project is an expansion of the 1976 and 1993 studies. Whereas the earlier studies involved high school German classes in one school system, the current study expands those parameters to French, German, Japanese, ESL, and Spanish university classes in diverse geographical regions.]

"A Comprehensive Computing Policy: What You Need and How to Get It." NEALL (North East Association for Learning Laboratories) 1994 Annual Meeting: "The Information Superhighway: How to Get into the Fast Lane." Siena College, New York, October 1994.

"Ideology and Modern Language Instruction: The Teaching of Modern Languages in Newfoundland, 1893-1993." Canadian History of Education Association. St. John's, October 1994.

PUBLICATIONS

"Three German Web Courses With a Study Abroad Component." Intercultural Literacies and German in the Classroom. Interkulturelle Kompetenzen im Frendsprachenunterricht. Festschrift fuer Manfred Prokop zum 65sten Geburtstag. Ed. John Plews, Chris Lorey, and Caroline Rieger. Tuebingen: Gunter Narr Verlag (Giessener Beitraege zur Fremdsprachendidaktik), 2007. 161-181.

"Easy, No-fail Keypalling for Novices." Virtual Connections: Online Activities & Projects for Networking Language Learners. Edited by Mark Warschauer. Honolulu: Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center, University of Hawaii, 1995. 94-95.

[This article outlines an email activity to bring language students into regular contact with native speakers.]

"The Communicative Language Teaching 'Revolution' Tested. A Comparison of Two Classroom Studies: 1976 and 1993." Foreign Language Annals 27/2(Summer 1994), 221-239.

[The article compares and analyzes two empirical studies on the types and quantity of language used in first-year German instruction. Whereas judgments regarding the impact of the communicative language teaching approach rely largely on anecdotal evidence, this study measures empirically whether beginning FL classes are more communicative now than they were seventeen years ago. The data, based on classroom observations, derive from my M.A. thesis on "Artificial versus Real Communication in Elementary Foreign Lang uage Classes (1977)" and a comprehensive follow-up study in 1993.]

"Slattery, John Luke." Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 13: 1901-1910. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1994, 956-958.

[My section of this article co-authored with H.Rollmann interprets Slattery's role in furthering higher education in Newfoundland, including foreign language study, and is a side product of my research on the history of the teaching of German in Newfoundland."]

"Der Angeklagte: A Dramatic Approach to Getting Acquainted at the Intermediate Level." Die Unterrichtspraxis, 26/2(1993), 194-95.

[The article depicts an activity that uses drama to get students talking.]

"Die schwarze Zaubertasche: Magical Cure for the Adjective-ending Woes." Die Unterrichtspraxis 25/2 (Fall 1992), 188-190.

[The article suggests an oral activity using props to help students master this notoriously difficult aspect of German language learning.]

Book Review: Widmaier, Fritz and Widmaier, Rosemarie. Treffpunkt Deutsch. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991. Pp. xix, 550. In Canadian Modern Language Review 48/1 (October 1991), 190-2.

WEB PAGES:

1996: In the fall of 1996 I created the web pages for the Department of German and Russian, with the help of a student assistant David Cantwell, and served as webmaster until October 2007, when the pages were redesigned to follow MUN's general template. There were initially two motivating factors in developing these pages: to house useful internet "links" for easy access by students, in particular the site for acquiring German penpals and for subscribing to the German-English discussion group RIBO, and also to house information about our Department and where we are located, since the following spring (May 1997) we were to host the CAUTG Annual Meeting as part of the Learned Societies Conference.

Since the initial launching of the departmental web pages, I have added the following useful sites:

German Tutorials

1998: I developed the tutorials with audio files when we adopted a new text book for our first- and second-year language courses and needed to revamp our oral exams and oral review materials. For the previous textbook I had prepared audiotaped review materials for each term's work, which were made available to students at the end of the term. I have organized the audio materials now available on the Internet chapter by chapter, so that students may choose what they want to review and may practise at any time during the term, avoiding last-minute cramming.

Format of the tutorials: Konversation. Here students are challenged by conversational phrases and questions they should be able to answer after mastering the chapter. Students may practise by reading the question, asking themselves how they would answer, then clicking on Answer to find appropriate answers. They may also hear how the questions and answers are pronounced by clicking on the ear icon. Kultur. A cultural summary is also provided for each chapter. Links.Related links on cultural topics addressed in each chapter are provided. Since these review materials are located on the Internet, students may access them from anywhere and at any time, and are not limited to class and lab times.

Another useful aspect of the tutorials is the information provided by the readers about themselves. Each reader of the questions and answers has provided personal information, an audio (as well as written) introduction, found under Konversation for each chapter. These mini-autobiographies provide excellent reading and listening materials of the "real communication" variety, since students cannot find out who these "real" people are and how they became fluent in German any way other than by understanding the German written or spoken text.

German Web Courses

1999: I developed and delivered three German web courses for the first time in Spring 1999. I taught these courses annually from spring 1999 through spring 2007. My aim in designing these web courses was to enable more students to afford a study-abroad experience. By combining an August study-abroad component with three courses in a web format, students could finance the trip by working full-time up until August, since they did not have to attend classes, or by student loans, since they were enrolled as full-time students. The web portion prepared the students linguistically and culturally to get the most out of the trip. 15-22 students enrolled in the courses each year. Returning students were enthusiastic about the program and provided the most effective encouragement for others to participate.

CAUTG Enrolment Reports

1999: I became the CAUTG surveyor for the year 1999-2000, a post I continued in through 2009-2010, jumping in again for the 2011-2012 Special Fiftieth Anniversary Report. This involved soliciting course-specific enrolment figures from all university German departments in Canada and producing an annual enrolment report. The report is delivered at the CAUTG annual meeting and after any corrections or additions posted on the CAUTG web site.

German Distance Education Courses

2006: In 2006 I designed the first beginning foreign language course to be offered online by Memorial University. German 1000 was offered in F2006 for the first time by distance, with students enrolled from all parts of Newfoundland as well as other Canadian provinces. The course was delivered by WebCT, Elluminate Live, and an audio-enhanced online workbook. In F2007 the delivery system changed to Desire2Learn. Students not only read but hear their text and receive immediate feedback on written assignments through the online workbook. They hear their instructor and classmates in virtual Elluminate Live class sessions. The follow-up course G1001 was offered for the first time in Winter 2007.

CAUTG Archive

2009--:The CAUTG Archive preserves the history of the organization since its inception. This rich collection of documents begins with the Minutes of the Organizational Meeting of the Canadian University Teachers of Germanics, held on June 14th, 1961, at 8:15pm at the University of Montreal (in conjunction with the Conference of Learned Societies), and includes Executive Meeting Minutes, Annual Business Meeting Minutes, financial reports, enrolment reports, correspondence, even some photo albums, and much more from 1961 to the present, as well as books from the old publication series and a copy of each Newsletter, Bulletin, and Directory. The previous archivist resigned in 2006 but no new archivist could be found until the entire collection was shipped to me in 2009. As archivist I have been updating the Archive anually and in 2016 completed the task of digitizing the Archive, which contains over 28 000 pages in more than 9 000 documents, divided into 300+ folders.


II. THE GERMAN MORAVIANS

The German-speaking Moravian missionaries to Labrador played a decisive role in preserving the Inuit language by giving it a written form and by compiling the first dictionaries and grammars.

My research on the Moravians in Labrador a) focusses on the role of language in inter-cultural relations and b) contributes to our understanding of second language acquisition by examining how the Moravians learned the unwritten Inuit language.

Here are some of my publications and presentations in this area:

PUBLICATIONS:

"Bourquin, Heinrich Theodor." Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 14: 1911-1920. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1998, 119-120.

[The article reconstructs and interprets the life and work of this German grammarian of the Labrador Inuit language. It relies on hitherto unused German sources, including his German autobiography.]

"The Role of Language in the Moravian Missions to Eighteenth-Century Labrador." Unitas Fratrum, 34(1993), 49-64.

[The article reconstructs the eighteenth-century linguistic contribution of German Moravians in Labrador. It establishes the historical link between Greenland and Labrador, discusses the scope of Inuktitut philology by eighteenth-century Germans, and demonstrates and analyzes the influence of German loanwords upon the Labrador Inuit language, including their cultural implications.]

PRESENTATIONS:

"The German Language Among the Native Peoples of North America." Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of German/American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, San Antonio, Texas, November 1993.

"Johann Christian Erhardt and Jens Haven: Two Voyages to the Coast of Labrador in the Eighteenth Century." Annual Meeting of the Association for Canadian Studies, Ottawa, June 5, 1993.

"Coping with Inuktitut: the German Moravians in Eighteenth-Century Labrador." Presentation to the Newfoundland Historical Society, March 25, 1993.

"From Herrnhut to Hoffenthal: Moravian lexicographic and linguistic contributions to eighteenth-century Inuktitut." Presentation to Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, St. John's, Nfld., 15-18 October 1992.