German:The History of German Language and Culture and Academic Writing

The course comprises of two parts, of which the first, language and cultural history, focuses on the main features of language development from Germanic to modern German with its dialectal variations. Representative texts from each time period is studied both from a phonetic, syntactic and a cultural point of view. In the second part of the course students comment on a, in this course previously produced, approved student paper and thereby builds a critically reflective approach. The students writes a scientific paper of about 7-10 pages, which can be related to language and cultural history or to any of the disciplines of linguistics or literature. Within the framework of the paper the students practice basic skills in academic writing such as formalities, source criticism and information retrieval.