Scope and content: 2 credit hours, German course for developing conversational skills at level B1 (CEFR).

Description: This course offers participants the opportunity to practice their conversational skills and complements German courses 5 and 6 (levels B1.1 and B1.2). Participants lean how to converse appropriately in everyday and university settings. This includes practising reporting, narration, argumentation and contradiction. In this course, learners can improve their ability to express themselves, their pronunciation, fluency and vocabulary.

Description: This course offers participants with a knowledge of German at intermediate level the opportunity to explore and further develop their writing skills. As opposed to standardised writing, participants in this course will have the freedom to work on their written assignments with a great deal of creativity and imagination. The writing process will be supervised by the teacher. Written texts will be discussed in a group setting and corrected or edited with regard to comprehensibility and expression. Participants are invited to make free, creative use of typical characteristics of well-known types of texts, e.g. fairy tales, detective stories, letters, poems and short stories. Further, the course will be augmented by elements of music, theatre and art. In this way, each participant's individual capacity for self-expression will be promoted. The texts produced will be collected in a portfolio and printed so that participants have a finished product to present at the end of the course.

Description: This reading course will cover a wide range of literary texts as appropriate for the intermediate level. By reading and discussing texts by German-speaking authors, participants improve their ability to express themselves in German while deepening their knowledge of Germany. A variety of methodical approaches and reading techniques are used. On the basis of the selected texts, students will produce texts ranging from argumentative texts to creative writing. In this way, students' ability to express themselves in writing will be enhanced as well as their ability to express themselves verbally.

Description: This advanced level course focuses on teaching grammatical structures commonly used in academic language and which therefore represent a linguistic basis for research and teaching at the University. The point of departure here is intensive textual analysis, starting with reception of the structures to analysis and processing, and then to application by the student. Particular attention is paid to grammar for specific types of texts. The objective of this course is to familiarise students of German with the most common linguistic academic structures so that they can not only understand and recognise them but also actively use them themselves.

Description: This advanced level course familiarises participants with academic working techniques and characteristics of academic language. Participants learn to identify essential content in academic texts and to reproduce it in the form of summaries and excerpts. Further, they practise the correct use of research literature, with special attention being paid to citation and bibliography. In the course of the seminar, participants develop a question regarding an academic topic of their own choosing, as well as an accompanying methodology and structure. Finally, they are expected to outline and describe their academic project in the form of an introduction to a term paper.

Scope and content: 2 credit hours, course for improving pronunciation in German from level B2 (CEFR).

Description: The aim of this course is to improve learners’ pronunciation of German. Based on the individual difficulties of the participants, we will use selected practical exercises to train the articulation of individual sounds (consonants, vowels), sound combinations and reductions (especially spoken language) as well as accents in words and sentences.