Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
Fall 2025
GER1820H F SLA in Theory and Practice
Time: Tue 12-2
Instructor: Hang-Sun Kim
This course is designed to introduce students with little or no prior second language teaching experience to the theories and practices of second/foreign language learning and teaching in post-secondary environments. Participants will gain a critical understanding of major SLA theories, methods, and techniques with a focus on lesson planning, task design, feedback & assessment, as well as on distinctive features of online language instruction. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and task design. Students will apply the learned techniques through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises. The overall objective of this course is to provide participants with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become competent, attentive, and reflective language instructors.
GER1000H F German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4
Instructors: Team taught, Coordinator: Angelica Fenner
This team-taught course covers some of the seminal debates in theory relevant to advanced students of German. Students are introduced to key theory texts. They are confronted with processes of problem-formation in theoretical writing; they have the opportunity to weigh different kinds of theory debates against one another; they familiarize themselves with the components and structure of theoretical argument.
GER1200H F (cross listed GER426) Middle High German
Time: Fri 10-12
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German
GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4
Instructor: Victoria Melnyk
In this course German reading knowledge is taught following the grammar-translation method designed for graduate students from the Humanities. It is an intensive course that covers German grammar with focus on acquiring essential structures of the German language to develop translation skills. The course is conducted in English, and consequently participants do not learn how to speak or write in German, but rather the course focuses exclusively on reading and translating German. Prior knowledge of German not mandatory. By the end of the course, students should be able to handle a broad variety of texts in single modern Standard German. This course is not intended for MA or PhD students in German.
Spring 2025
JGC1855H S Critical Theory
Time: Tue 3-5
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference.
GER1722H S Kafka
Time: Thu 12-2
Instructor: John Zilcosky
This course examines the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, as it developed in a remarkably short period: from his 1911-12 novel, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and his 1912 breakthrough novella, The Metamorphosis; to his middle years, during World War I, when he wrote The Trial and the burst of stories collected in A Country Doctor; to The Castle and the final stories he penned before dying, at age forty, in 1924. We will attempt to understand why Kafka, who published so little and never completed any of his novels, left a powerful legacy on world literature and culture.
GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4
Instructor: Victoria Melnyk
In this course German reading knowledge is taught following the grammar-translation method designed for graduate students from the Humanities. It is an intensive course that covers German grammar with focus on acquiring essential structures of the German language to develop translation skills. The course is conducted in English, and consequently participants do not learn how to speak or write in German, but rather the course focuses exclusively on reading and translating German. Prior knowledge of German not mandatory. By the end of the course, students should be able to handle a broad variety of texts in single modern Standard German. This course is not intended for MA or PhD students in German.