Master of Arts - German

Program Description

The MA program in German provides students a customizable, flexible curriculum to develop advanced linguistic and cultural expertise in a language and to apply that expertise in the disciplinary or professional contexts of their choice. Whether in the “global village” of today’s world or in multi-ethnic communities such as Chicago, this advanced expertise is an increasingly valuable personal and professional asset, requiring appropriate training and credentials. The MA program especially seeks to serve adult professionals (government employees, social workers, healthcare providers, business people, or certified K-12 teachers) whose careers require this applied expertise.

Learning Outcomes

​Students will be able to:

• Speak and participate in most informal and some formal conversations from topics related to school, home, and leisure activities, to many related to employment, current events, and matters of public and community interest.
• Narrate and describe in the major time frames of past, present, and future in paragraph-length discourse with some control of aspect, as well as combine and link sentences into connected discourse of paragraph length; although these narrations and descriptions tend to be handled separately rather than interwoven.
• Use communicative strategies such as rephrasing and circumlocution, and contribute to a conversation with sufficient accuracy, clarity, and precision to convey their intended message without misrepresentation or confusion.
• Combine and link sentences into texts of paragraph length and structure, and use minimal control of common structures and vocabulary.
• Listen and comprehend (albeit unevenly) short conventional narrative and descriptive texts with a clear underlying structure.
• Understand conventional narrative and descriptive texts with clear underlying structure (though their comprehension may be uneven).