Providing Students with More than Just Another Class Project: A Journalism Writing Course at a German Summer School.

Intensive summer language schools are designed to increase student exposure to the target language, both in quantity and type. One way to increase student interest in the input is for a journalism class to produce a daily student newspaper in the target language. Such a project has gained popularity at a Portland, Oregon intensive German summer school. The newspaper project holds the interest of these intensive language students, for it allows them to read about up to the minute news events in the target language, ridding them of any feelings of isolation from the real world. The publication's language is usually quite simple since it is created by students for students, and it can report campus, local, and world news. The skills practiced in producing the newspaper go beyond classroom language skills, entailing news gathering, class discussion, interviewing and other specialized information gathering, translation, and organization and composition of the articles. It has been found to be an extremely time-efficient activity because of the intensive student participation. Students have also sharpened journalistic skills, German keyboard use, and word separation skills. Undergraduate or beginning graduate courses in which the students have had some advanced composition and conversation and are interested in improving, accelerating, and diversifying their writing skills, are best suited for this kind of course. (MSE)