Welcome to German Online Reading! This 6-week course will help you enhance your German reading and speaking skills.
A key part of this course is reflective practice. Educational psychology tells us that when people reflect on what they learn, they integrate that learning more successfully into their pre-existing knowledge.
This course will integrate reflection through blog posts. Each week you will be asked to write a blog post about the week's article. This is to encourage you to think more deeply about the readings. You may additionally comment on other students' blog posts, and the instructor will be commenting as well on various posts. All posts should be written in German, to help you work more deeply with the German language itself. Following this method, you will see your German change over the next 6 weeks.
I am having difficulty posting my blog entry as a separate entry so I am going to post it is a comment. To answer the first question, I would say that the reading strategies I use when reading a German text depend on the context. If I am reading for pleasure -- which doesn't happen very often these days, unfortunately -- I try to read the entire text. I don't do much in the way of pre-reading because I have picked the text for the pleasure of it. I know what I am getting into from the outset. When I am reading for work, my reading strategy again depends a little on the context. If I am reading in order to find out particular information than I would scan the text. I am rarely skimming, although it would probably be a useful strategy to employ if I were reading German texts that I did not know (for example, for a language test). In fact, I would say that is the one time recently when I have employed that strategy. I would benefit from making more frequent use of other reading strategies other than intensive reading. I have been compelled somewhat to rely on other methods because of learning other languages in the Foreign Service. German is the foreign language I am most comfortable in, so I perhaps rely too much on simply reading in a linear fashion -- not reading bottom up and top down.
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