German IV

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :

• follow extended speech even when it is not clearly structured and when relationships are only implied and not signalled explicitly; - understand standard spoken language, live or broadcast;
  
• easily follow complex interactions between third parties in group discussion and debate, even on abstract, complex unfamiliar topics;
  
• understand spoken language displaying light regional varieties;
  
• easily summarize lectures, conferences and talks (even on specialized topics) presented by native speakers;
  
• understand a wide range of journalistic, literary or domain-specific texts;
  
• appreciate stylistic differences between texts (written or spoken); - discover the structure of discourse;
  
• recognize stylistic devices typical of the target language and provide equivalents in his/her mother tongue;
  
• identify the targeted readership of a text;
  
• have a good command of a broad lexical repertoire allowing gaps to be readily overcome with circumlocutions and avoidance strategies;
  
• have a good command of idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms;
  
• make no significant vocabulary errors;
  
• consistently maintain a high degree of grammatical accuracy; errors are rare;
  
• be able to vary intonation and place sentence stress correctly in order to express finer shades of meaning;
  
• use consistent and accurate layout, paragraphing, spelling and punctuation;
  
• produce clear, smoothly flowing, well-structured speech, showing controlled use of organizational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.