Beginning in 2000 and continuing today, the University of North Carolina (UNC) German Consortium offers online German courses to undergraduate students across sixteen of the seventeen UNC public universities. The delivery of online classes differs per faculty member and little previous research investigated the UNC German Consortium's learning technologies. This dissertation investigates the evolution of learning technologies within the UNC German Consortium over the last sixteen years among German faculty from different UNC public universities. Seven faculty and one administrator shared their experiences through interviews. The methodology for this research was hermeneutic phenomenology. Interviewees shared their experiences with learning technology and teaching in the UNC German Consortium including how learning technologies changed over time. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed to deduce themes. Themes included the importance of the North Carolina Research Education Network (NC REN) for teaching German online, an asynchronous versus synchronous debate, how professors taught in synchronous courses, the importance of learning management systems (LMS) systems, the resilient characteristics of UNC German Consortium faculty, and the need for continual learning as an instructor.

Contemporary education literature indicates that motivation can be a deciding factor in a student’s second language acquisition experience. The desire to learn more about the motivation of my own students in a second language learning setting sparked the onset of action research that led me to a better understanding of my subject area, myself as a professional, and most importantly, my students. My initial round of inquiry was a basic one from which the other branches of research evolved: finding out what students felt was motivational about my German class. Research, in each round, took place both through examining existing literature as well as through classroom based research focused on my students. The first round of action research led to the next research area pertinent to understanding and harnessing the power of motivation in my classroom: Using theory to re-shape practical classroom approaches in order to capitalize on motivational factors identified by students. As this round of action research took form, the need for further research became apparent: In order to truly understand what was happening in my German classroom concerning intrinsic student motivation, it was necessary to look more closely at why students were motivated by the factors they had indicated. As a classroom teacher, my initial goal was to optimize factors that I, as the classroom teacher, can control in order to make German language learning as motivational for students as possible. As Dörnyei says, (Dörnyei 2001 a, p. 2): “…99 percent of language learners who really want to learn a foreign language (i.e. who are really motivated) will be able to master a reasonable working knowledge of it as a minimum, regardless of their language aptitude.” Action research was the way for me to better understand a small slice of students’ motivational intricacies concerning German language learning - those which are based in my classroom itself and are under my control to influence. / Curriculum and Instructional Studies

Includes vita. / Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 130 pages. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: This study investigated the effects of animation for a technology-assisted German grammar presentation on modal verbs. The premise was that many intangible concepts of dynamic grammar involve syntactic components that possess visuo-spatial characteristics. It was further speculated that these characteristics could be more effectively represented by animated versus static instructional presentations.The supposition that animation would lend pedagogical advantage was supported by dual coding theory (Paivio, 1971, 1990), which posits two functionally separate representational systems, the verbal and the nonverbal, with dynamic mental imagery residing solely in the nonverbal system. The strength of dually coded information is that it is represented in both subsystems and, due to referential associations that cross between the two, is more easily retained and recalled.Under two treatment conditions, 44 university students of beginning German (GER 101) received large-screen multimedia instruction concerning the meanings and conjugated forms of German modal auxiliary verbs, and the grammatical rules which govern sentence structure. The independent variable was the type of visualization: static or animated text. The dependent variables were participants' total test scores as well as their individual scores on each of two task types: conjugation and word order. In addition, a posttest survey asked participants for their opinions of the instructional treatments.Participants in both treatment groups achieved high scores on the posttest with no significant difference between them; however, the posttest survey showed that the groups did differ significantly in their opinions of the treatments, with those in the animated group reporting more positive reactions to the presentation. Detailed planning and lengthy preparation of both treatments may explain the high scores for both groups, and the elementary nature of the content may also account for the resulting ceiling effect. Animation should be studied further, especially with respect to more preliminary tasks, more complex tasks, as well as in concert with other aspects of multimedia, such as interactivity, user-control, practice, and feedback. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Contemporary education literature indicates that motivation can be a deciding factor in a student’s second language acquisition experience. The desire to learn more about the motivation of my own students in a second language learning setting sparked the onset of action research that led me to a better understanding of my subject area, myself as a professional, and most importantly, my students. My initial round of inquiry was a basic one from which the other branches of research evolved: finding out what students felt was motivational about my German class. Research, in each round, took place both through examining existing literature as well as through classroom based research focused on my students. The first round of action research led to the next research area pertinent to understanding and harnessing the power of motivation in my classroom: Using theory to re-shape practical classroom approaches in order to capitalize on motivational factors identified by students. As this round of action research took form, the need for further research became apparent: In order to truly understand what was happening in my German classroom concerning intrinsic student motivation, it was necessary to look more closely at why students were motivated by the factors they had indicated. As a classroom teacher, my initial goal was to optimize factors that I, as the classroom teacher, can control in order to make German language learning as motivational for students as possible. As Dörnyei says, (Dörnyei 2001 a, p. 2): “…99 percent of language learners who really want to learn a foreign language (i.e. who are really motivated) will be able to master a reasonable working knowledge of it as a minimum, regardless of their language aptitude.” Action research was the way for me to better understand a small slice of students’ motivational intricacies concerning German language learning - those which are based in my classroom itself and are under my control to influence. / Curriculum and Instructional Studies / D. Ed. (Curriculum Studies)

This thesis tackles the issues of foreign language education, with special attention to German as a foreign language, and STEM education in the K-12, and in some cases K-16, educational system. After exploring the societal and national need for improved STEM and foreign language education programs, this thesis suggests methods of integrating STEM education elements and principals in the foreign language classroom. These methods are provided in chapters about integrating state and national education standards in the STEM fields, core academic subject fields, and foreign language teaching, and finally in chapters about the most appropriate and effective pedagogies for successful STEM and foreign language integration. The thesis brings together research about such integration in learning modules and discussion about assessment methods and further areas of research needed. The learning modules and research are answering a call for a need to shift education in the direction of an integrative, interdisciplinary approach that supports deeper learning, meaning making, and student interest.