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I am currently keeping busy with the following research projects:

1. As Chair of the department’s Curriculum Committee, I am working with my colleagues to integrate language and content across all four years of the undergraduate curriculum. Once the departmental mission statement was finalized that characterized the department’s interdisciplinary, inquiry-based approach to the cultural production of the German-speaking world, the committee has been working on identifying and sequencing content areas for the four years of undergraduate study. Central to the sequencing process is aligning content foci with the language acquisitional goals of each curricular level. An essential criterion for determining a topic’s place within the curriculum is where the topic’s prototypical textual manifestation falls along a continuum reflecting a text’s readability and accessibility for the L2 learner. The initial discussions of this sequencing work was completed in late 2007, and the committee devoted its attention in spring 2008 to revising the first-year course to serve as a model of integrated language study. The first-year course was piloted during the 2008-09 academic year. The curricular work drew on the experience of developing and implementing the first-year course and focused its attention during the 2008-09 academic year on revising the second- and third-year courses.This academic year the second-year course (201-202) is being piloted while discussions continue regarding revisions to the third- and fourth-year courses in order to establish an articulated, content-oriented trajectory across all four years of study. This site will be continually updated

2. Heather Willis Allen (University of Miami) and I are co-editing the 2011 volume in the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators' (AAUSC) series on Issues in Language Program Direction. Entitled Educating the Future FL Professoriate for the 21st Century, the volume takes the 2007 MLA Report and its proposed changes as a point of departure and explores pedagogical and structural means and models for graduate student education in light of the significant changes the FL profession is and has been undergoing. (Call for papers)

3. I am working with Lone Petersen, a graduate student in the German Department at Georgetown University, to apply a systemic functional linguistic framework to the analysis of longitudinal L2 German written data in order to examine intra- and interclausal development as an aspect of an emergent advanced L2 writing ability. We presented the findings of this analysis in the three-hour symposium “Researching advanced L2 writing: Theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues” at the 15th World Congress of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA) in Essen, Germany in August 2008 and are now working on writing up the results for publication. (abstract)

4. Heidi Byrnes, John Norris, and I have submitted for review the monograph Realizing Advanced L2 Writing Development in a Collegiate Curriculum: From Outcomes Expectations to Assessment that will appear in the new Monograph Series of the Modern Language Journal in December 2010. (proposal)

November 2009