Synopses & Reviews
The Giant Who Ate Trondheim” (risen som spiste Trondheim) is just one of the proficiency-oriented activities suggested in this multifaceted teachers manual. Developed for the learner-centered classroom, the activities included here create opportunities for students to practice their language skills in wayssometimes amusing, sometimes more seriousthat encourage meaningful communication. Exercises such as games, creating cartoon captions, group writing of advice letters, and song lyric completion help intermediate learners of Norwegian to bridge the gap between comprehending the language and making effective use of it in expressing their own feelings, opinions, and experiences.
Reflecting recent trends in language teaching methods that favor greater learner input and emphasize the students own originality and creativity, the small group and paired activities in this book enhance language learning by:
maximizing the amount of speaking and listening done by each individual student
allowing more natural communication
decreasing learner inhibition
permitting greater freedom to express personal opinion
making the instructor more accessible to individual learners
increasing the amount of learner interaction
promoting cooperation and active listening.
By encouraging the learners to help each other develop communication proficiency, the activities establish a community atmosphere in the classroom and create an environment that spurs learners to speak and listen to each other.
Norsk, nordmenn og Norge: Lærerveiledning (Teachers Manual) is a companion to the Norsk, nordmenn og Norge: Antologi (Anthology) and Arbeidsbok (Workbook).
Synopsis
What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provocative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture s tendency to valorize nature and the rural world.
Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics have explicitly or implicitly emphasized the opposition between urban and rural sensibilities in America, an equally important feature of American thought and writing has been the widespread interest in collapsing that division. Convinced that the native landscape has offered special opportunities, Americans since the age of settlement have sought to build a harmonious urban-pastoral society combining the best of both worlds. Moreover, this goal has gone largely unchallenged in the culture except for the sophisticated responses in the writings of some of America s most eminent literary artists.
Pastoral Cities explains the development of urban pastoralism from its origins in the prophetic vision of the New Jerusalem, applied to America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through its secularization in the urban planning and reform of the 1800s. Machor critiques the sophisticated treatment of urban pastoralism by writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Wharton, and James by skillfully by combining cultural analysis with a close reading of urban plans, travel narratives, sermons, and popular novels. The product of this multifaceted approach is an analysis that works to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the pastoral ideal as cultural mythology."
Synopsis
This teacher's guide to the intermediate anthology and workbook suggests a variety of classroom communicative activities for both pairs and small groups.
About the Author
Kathleen Stokker is professor of Norwegian at Luther College. A frequent lecturer on the Norwegian language, she has written numerous articles on Norwegian folklore, history, and traditions. She is the coauthor of Norsk, nordmenn og Norge 1: Textbook for Beginning Norwegian, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.