German Scholarly Works

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  • Publication
    Beethoven in the Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright
    (Frank Lloyd Wright Society, 2024-02-28) Baron, Frank
    The key common element between Beethoven’s composition and Wright’s architecture was the concept of building. Wright emphasized this particular understanding of Beethoven with an emphatic repetition: Beethoven was “building, building, building, building a great edifice of sound.” This Wright learned from his father, who impressed Wright, when he was still a child, explaining how Beethoven composed. Hence Wright presented the observer with an extraordinary challenge: to believe that the architect was able to translate in his mind Beethoven’s mysterious “building” in music into the physical form of his architecture.
  • Publication
    Data-driven learning beyond English: Insights and implications from three monographs
    (Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València, 2023-08) Forti, Luciana; Vyatkina, Nina; Schaeffer-Lacroix, Eva
    Despite the growth of DDL in second language (L2) research and education in many languages, its focus has largely been on English. As a result, the knowledge about the applicability of DDL for learning LOTE remains limited. This hinders the validity and generalizability of DDL as a whole, and conceals the important implications related to bridging the research vs. practice gap in such contexts where the focus is on LOTEs. The monographs introduced in this paper demonstrate the relevance of DDL for learning LOTEs by discussing corpus-based resources, pedagogical applications, and empirical research from three perspectives.
  • Publication
    The Auschwitz Report
    (Pitt Open Library Publishing, 2023-09-06) Baron, Frank
    The escape of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, was extraordinary in its daring, courageous execution, and impact. The challenging task of the two escapees was to inform the world of previously unimaginable crimes, and to do so in a way that made the unbelievable believable. Because the deportations to Auschwitz were still in progress, it was essential to inform the threatened Jewish populations that they were slated by the Germans to be part of the “final solution.” When and how the transmission of the resulting Auschwitz Report took place, made all the difference, and that is this paper’s focus. Decisive transmissions involved secret networks in Switzerland and Hungary, taking place independently. Despite the presence of the Gestapo and the German army, finally, in early July, 1944, two independent, increasingly powerful efforts engendered by the report converged in Budapest. Only then could one of the most remarkable rescues of World War II take place. fbaron@ku.edu
  • Publication
    Technology and Vocabulary
    (Routledge, 2022) Vyatkina, Nina
    Vocabulary knowledge is one of the most important components of L2 proficiency (Schmitt, 2010). At the same time, the acquisition of L2 vocabulary is particularly challenging because it is item-based as opposed to rule-based acquisition of grammar. That is to say that vocabulary items (words and multiword units) need to be learned one-by-one, which requires repeated exposure and practice. Furthermore, learners need to be actively engaged with the target lexical items for them to be committed to memory and eventually acquired. With the exponential growth of technological applications for L2 learning in recent years, many tools and methods have come to the aid of learners by increasing both the frequency of exposure and the level of engagement.
  • Publication
    Complexity
    (Routledge, 2021-01) Vyatkina, Nina; Housen, Alex
    This chapter focuses on the construct of second language complexity: the range of linguistic (e.g., lexical, syntactic, morphological) forms and the degree of elaboration of these forms in learner language. The chapter reviews how measures of second language complexity have been used to characterize learner proficiency and to chart learner development with the help of learner corpus research methods and tools, as well as how complexity is modulated by task effects and language typology features.
  • Publication
    The Early Date of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
    (Academia.edu, 2022-01) Baron, Frank
    Christopher Marlowe was responsible for the first significant literary transformation of the German Faust Book of 1587. Thus, a propagandistic pamphlet about a demonic magician became genuine dramatic literature. The focus of the present article is a short period when this major transformation took place. Because the first edition of the English Faust Book has been lost, it is difficult to reconstruct when and how Marlowe completed his Faustus. But evidence of a significant combination of mistakes in the first printing of the English Faust Book, the text of Marlowe’s stage play, and the contemporary Faustus ballad make it possible to reconstruct and date Marlowe’s masterpiece in the period of 1588 or early 1589.
  • Publication
    “Zum ersten Mal sah ich ein Bild:” Goethe’s Cognitive Viewing Subject as Scientist and Artist
    (University of Toronto Press, 2019) Meyertholen, Andrea
    This article investigates the significance of Goethean natural science for the development of abstract modes of painting that would emerge with Wassily Kandinsky in the early twentieth century. While early abstractionists like Kandinsky unveiled their artworks with publications providing intellectual justification for an objectless art, a theoretical framework for a mode of viewing necessary for engaging with abstract art was already in existence, having been conceived by Goethe in his 1792 essay “Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt.” Close reading of this text reveals a primary model for a cognitive viewing subject who draws on sensory experience and cognitive faculties to assume a critically significant degree of subjectivity in aesthetic encounters. To demonstrate how the mode of viewing theorized by Goethe might operate in praxis, this article analyzes an exemplary moment of spectatorship credited for bringing about abstract art: Kandinsky’s storied first encounter with Claude Monet’s Haystacks.
  • Publication
    Rumpelstiltskin’s (Queer) Secret: Nonbinary Bodies Buried between the Lines of the Brothers Grimm
    (Wayne State University Press, 2021-04-01) Meyertholen, Andrea
    The strangeness of "Rumpelstiltskin" continues to fascinate audiences and perplex folklorists long after reaching the Grimms from women storytellers in the spinning chamber. Despite its discovery in the tale, Rumpelstiltskin's identity remains mysterious from beginning to end. While previous scholarship decodes the figure as an avatar for male oppression or opportunity for female resistance, this article argues that Rumpelstiltskin is not interchangeable with or symbolic of patriarchal institutions but rather an ambiguous body victimized by them. "Rumpelstiltskin" read queerly with an expanded spectrum of gender and sexuality challenges the heteronormative assumptions embedded in the text and gives voice to queer subjectivities.
  • Publication
    Discovery Learning: Teaching Languages with Corpora
    (Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO), 2020-12) Vyatkina, Nina
  • Publication
    Data-driven learning for languages other than English: The cases of French, German, Italian, and Spanish
    (EuroCALL, 2020-12-13) Jablonkai, Reka; Forti, Luciana; Castelló, Magdalena Abad; Iguenane, Isabelle Salengros; Schaeffer-Lacroix, Eva; Vyatkina, Nina
    This paper summarises the contributions to EuroCALL’s CorpusCALL SIG Symposium for the year 2020. In line with this year’s EuroCALL conference theme, ‘CALL for widening participation’, the Symposium centred around the theme of Data-driven learning for languages other than English. This paper gives a brief overview of developments and challenges when using Data-Driven Learning (DDL) to teach French, German, Italian, and Spanish. As research suggests, a DDL approach has been effectively utilised to teach these languages. However, there are differences in available DDL resources and corpora for the respective languages that are appropriate for language teaching. The main challenges for future developments are also discussed.
  • Publication
    Stopping the Trains to Auschwitz, Budapest, 1944
    (2020-10-01) Baron, Frank
    Despite Hitler’s and Eichmann’s secret machinery for the deportation of Jews from the Hungarian provinces, dramatic events finally interrupted the progress of their unprecedented crimes. Although many thousands had already perished, a rescue effort saved the Jewish population of Budapest. The initiative resulted from the courageous actions of networks within Hungary and Switzerland. The Auschwitz Report, the detailed revelations of two Slovak escapees, revealed to them the truth about the deportations. They took dangerous risks by aggressively challenging the power of the Nazi extermination program.
  • Publication
    Corpora as open educational resources for language teaching
    (Wiley, 2020-06-09) Vyatkina, Nina
    Corpora, large electronic collections of texts, have been used in language teaching for several decades. Also known as Data‐Driven Learning (DDL), this method has been gaining popularity because empirical research has consistently shown its effectiveness for learning. However, corpora are still underutilized, especially with learners of languages other than English, at lower proficiency levels, and in non‐university contexts. This is regrettable because DDL has a great potential for developing modular flipped content, especially for hybrid, remote, and online courses. This article first provides an overview of DDL applications and findings of empirical research. Next, it outlines obstacles to wider DDL implementation as well as available and possible solutions. Corpus user guides and exercise collections tied to specific corpora are discussed as one promising direction, and an example of such new open educational resources for teaching German is presented. The article concludes with a discussion of implications and future directions.
  • Publication
    Corpus-Informed Pedagogy in a Language Course: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation
    (IGI Global, 2020) Vyatkina, Nina
    Data-Driven Learning (DDL), or a corpus-based method of language teaching and learning, has been developing rapidly since the turn of the century and has been shown to be effective and efficient. Nevertheless, DDL is still not widely used in regular classrooms for a number of reasons. One of them is that few workable pedagogical frameworks have been suggested for integrating DDL into language courses and curricula. This chapter describes an exemplar of a practical application of such a peda- gogical framework to a high-intermediate university-level German as a foreign language course with a significant DDL component. The Design-Based Research approach is used as the main methodological framework. The chapter concludes with a discussion of wider pedagogical implications.
  • Publication
    Der Mythos des faustischen Teufelspakts: Geschichte, Legende, Literatur
    (DeGruyter, 2019-08) Baron, Frank
    The tale of Faust is inspired by a deal with the devil, a legacy of witch persecution. The anonymous author of the Faust Book of 1587 used such a deal as a plot device. Despite Christopher Marlowe’s masterpiece, based on that translation, the Enlightenment considered the pact with the devil a superstition. Lessing and Goethe thought it necessary to reshape the myth radically.
  • Publication
    Integrating Research Skills into the German Studies Curriculum
    (2019-05-10) Vanchena, Lorie A.; Emler, Trina; Devlin, Frances A.; Vyatkina, Nina; Arsenault, Emily; Meyertholen, Andrea; Linden, Ari
    The faculty expected students in the capstone course to complete requirements for a content-rich course and also produce a research paper in German, but discovered that most students did not have the research skills to write such a paper. After participating in the 2017-2018 Center for Undergraduate Research Faculty Working Group on Integrating Research into the Curriculum, they decided to scaffold research skills strategically into five required courses in the German Studies major: GERM 301: High Intermediate German I GERM 302: High Intermediate German II GERM 315: German Literature and the Modern Era GERM 401: Advanced German I GERM 580: Senior Capstone Course: Contemporary German-Speaking Europe
  • Publication
    Language Corpora for L2 Vocabulary Learning: Data-Driven Learning Across the Curriculum
    (Cenage Learning, 2018) Vyatkina, Nina
    Empirical Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) research on L2 vocabulary has shown that Data-Driven Learning (DDL), or teaching and learning languages with the help of corpora (large, structured electronic collections of texts) is beneficial for L2 vocabulary acquisition. Nevertheless, it is still far from becoming a common pedagogical practice, not least because few pedagogical manuals and user-friendly corpus tutorials have been published to date. This chapter describes how DDL with an open access German language corpus has been used across the curriculum in a German Studies program at a North American university. I report empirical results and present specific pedagogical suggestions and activities for using a corpus to enhance L2 vocabulary knowledge at all proficiency levels, and show how DDL can help learners improve not only the breadth of their L2 vocabulary knowledge (the number of words the basic meaning of which the learner knows), but also the depth of this knowledge, including collocations, frequency, and grammatical patterns. Although this chapter uses a German program as a case study, its pedagogical suggestions can be applied to teaching any language for which open access electronic corpora are available.
  • Publication
    Apocalypse Now: On Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Emergence of Abstract Art
    (Wiley Online Library, 2013) Meyertholen, Andrea
    While discussions of abstract art usually imply that the movement began in the twentieth century, its conceptualization pre‐dates its identification as a distinct tendency in the visual arts. One early text that articulates the premises of abstract art is Heinrich von Kleist's “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” his narrative response from 1810 to Caspar David Friedrich's controversial painting Der Mönch am Meer. For all its inherent radicality and despite its departure from mimetic representation, Der Mönch am Meer does not constitute a leap on the part of Friedrich to abstract aesthetics. Rather, I argue that, in his re‐imagining of Der Mönch am Meer, Kleist crosses this threshold, constituting a vision of nonrepresentational art nearly a century prior to its purported existence. As I show by examining both painting and prose, what Friedrich anticipates with his visual image, Kleist describes in his written text.
  • Publication
    It's Not Easy Being Green: The Failure of Abstract Art in Gottfried Keller's Der grüne Heinrich
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) Meyertholen, Andrea
    This article revisits the art and artists of Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich, a novel concluding with a conservative stance against artistic innovation, in order to explore how pre–twentieth-century literary fiction advanced the development of unconventional modes of artistic expression such as abstract art. Through comparative analysis of two fictional artworks described in the novel, I argue that Keller’s nineteenth-century bildungsroman preconditions radical twentieth-century art forms by establishing the self-awareness of the artist as necessary for the creation of unorthodox artworks. This investigation of cross-medial exchange emphasizes the cultural work performed by literature in furthering and fostering innovative visual media.
  • Publication
    Modelling the Dynamics of Intergenerational Assimilation to a Dominant Contact Language (American English) in German Linguistic Enclaves on the Great Plains
    (Winter Verlag, 2016-10) Keel, William D.
    Within the course of one or two future generations, the numerous linguistic varieties of German transplanted to the New World from Europe over the course of several centuries will be passing from existence. The only exception to this rule will be the varieties of German spoken in isolated rural Anabaptist settlements (e.g. Old Order Amish). In this essay, we compare the transition of five distinct speech communities of transplanted German varieties in Missouri and Kansas to American English. Factors which contributed to the assimilation of the German variety to American English appear to be largely social change affecting the entire society, including out-migration as well as enhanced mobility with the introduction of automobiles and improved roadways. Equally significant in the transition was the language of instruction in schools for the younger generations. For many of these communities, public schools with instruction in English, especially for those continuing beyond the eighth grade, led to more and more of the younger members using English among themselves. This in turn impacted the language used for worship services in the churches. Church elders faced with younger members who no longer felt comfortable in German worship services began introducing English prior to the First World War. In general, the generation born after the Second World War has only a fragmentary knowledge of their parents’ German variety.