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Building on recent efforts to bridge transformative learning and world language education (Clifford & Reisinger, 2019; Johnson, 2015; Randolph & Johnson, 2017), this article explores how perspective‐shifting can be fostered among L2 learners through critical reflection tasks staged across collegiate language curricula. A range of reflection tasks designed to decenter the self from existing assumptions, beliefs, and values as learners try on and respond to cultural perspectives different from their own is presented, focusing on the developmental needs of learners at different instructional levels. The study investigates how beginning to advanced collegiate L2 learners perceive working with structured reflection (SR) tasks across two German programs in the United States (an R1 state university and a private liberal arts college). Analysis of student surveys (n = 237) shows that L2 learners largely valued doing reflective work and that some learners found SR helped them to think about and evaluate their learning and facilitate perspective‐shifting.

Adopting a genre lens informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, ; Martin & Rose, ), this paper explores the text‐structural and lexico‐grammatical choices that second language (L2) writers of German make in personal letter writing. Close analysis of two student texts from an advanced, content‐based, college‐level German course help to illustrate more and less successful realizations of a complex letter task. Both genre and register analyses of these texts show how letter writing can offer L2 learners opportunities to practice evaluative (especially affective) discourse and develop understanding for different subject positions. Key text‐structural and linguistic patterns are summarized in a writing rubric that teachers can use to guide and assess students’ personal letter writing. As the writing task at the center of the study is based on the young‐adult novel, Damals war es Friedrich (1961), and is situated within an instructional unit on German memories of the Holocaust, the analysis additionally contributes to ongoing dialogue concerning the teaching of the Holocaust (cf. Hirsch & Kacandes, ), by focusing on students’ engagement with the content material through a linguistic perspective.

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This article argues that the construct of task can provide a principled and effective foundation for the development of extended, multi-year curricula and pedagogies for second/foreign language learning of adults. That assertion is made with an important condition: "task" must be expanded, both theoretically and empirically, toward issues that arise in conjunction with textuality and literacy rather than being grounded primarily in psycho linguistic, sentence-oriented processing considerations, as original proposals by Long and Crookes (1992) had suggested. The article presents that overall theoretical argument and then describes how genre-based tasks have been used (1) for selection and sequencing decisions within an existing contentoriented collegiate curriculum in the German Department at Georgetown University; (2) as a way to inform pedagogical choices that target advanced levels of L2 ability, particularly the crucial area of vocabulary development; and (3) to devise genre-based tasks that assess L2 learners' language abilities and content knowledge across the curriculum and also help to further specify learning objectives and curricular choices.

To know a word receptively and productively, second language (L2) learners must have knowledge of a word's form, meaning, and use, including grammatical functions and collocational patterns (Nation, 2001). Frame semantics (Fillmore, 1982) provides a useful model to help L2 learners deepen their lexical knowledge. A functional and construction grammar developed to explain form-function pairings, the model views "frame" as a meaningful linguistic structuring device evoked by sets of related lexical items. These diverse lexical units exist along a continuum, theorized in Construction Grammar, from individual to multi-word to abstract schematic constructions. Building on recent studies that explore frame semantics' potential for L2 vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Atzler, 2011; Boas & Dux, 2013; Boas, Dux, & Ziem, 2016), this study investigated how beginning and intermediate L2 learners of German (N=65) perceive and report interacting with a frame-based dictionary, the German Frame-Semantic Online Lexicon (G-FOL). Discussion centers on the affordances G-FOL offers in learning mulitfaceted aspects of vocabulary knowledge, which textbooks often fail to address (Neary-Sundquist, 2015). The study provides teachers, program directors, and designers of frame-based dictionaries with valuable information about the perceived usefulness of frame semantics for L2 learners across instructional levels. Few educators would dispute that the development of the lexicon plays an essential role in learning a second language (L2). Consequently, discussion focuses on how best to teach vocabulary (e.g.