2020 Pre-Conference Workshop

NCOLCTL is proud to present, in conjunction with its 23rd annual conference, a workshop titled: 

OPI Familiarization

The workshop will be held on Thursday, April 16th from 9am to 4pm at the Crown Plaza Hotel & Resorts. Limited spaces are available and will be given on a first-come-first-serve basis.

There is a workshop registration fee of $40. Register by clicking on the button below.

Workshop Description

Learning about proficiency changed my teaching dramatically! Shortly before being trained, I had given a “chapter test” including an essay on “Freedom” in a second year language class, a topic on which the students were barely able to write anything. About three weeks after the training, I gave another chapter test including an essay on “Your Living Situation,” about which, to my relief, students were able to write fairly well. Why? Well, the training had taught me to differentiate between concrete and abstract topics and to realize that just because students knew a particular word did not mean they could write about the concept involved!

Bio

Karl F. Otto, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). His undergraduate education was at Aquinas College (Grand Rapids MI), his graduate education at Northwestern University (Evanston IL). After receiving his Ph.D., with a specialty in Seventeenth-Century German Literature, he taught at the University of Illinois (Chicago) before moving to Pennsylvania in the mid 1980s. In addition to teaching language, he taught both culture and literature courses, including Introduction to German Literature, Thomas Mann, seminars on The Picaresque Novel (interdisciplinary) and Andreas Gryphius, as well as humanities courses in English (e.g., Angels in Literature, the Faust Theme in European Literature.