German Reading Skills for Academic Purposes Coll. Routledge Practical Academic Reading Skills

German Reading Skills for Academic Purposes allows researchers and learners with no prior understanding of German to gain an understanding of written German at CEFR C2/ACTFL Intermediate-High level that will allow them to read a variety of German texts, including research articles and monographs.

This is achieved by looking closely at the elements of German grammar required for the understanding of written German along with practical advice and observations.

One of the main themes running through the textbook is that it uses a toolkit approach that puts deductive reasoning and decoding skills at its heart to allow learners to engage with a wide variety of texts.

Chapter 1 – Deductive Reasoning; German alphabet and pronunciation; cognates Chapter 2 – Fundamental German and English grammar concepts; German sentence structure Chapter 3 – German genders; plurals in German; separable verbs; how to identify verbs Chapter 4 – Modal verbs; imperative forms; idiomatic expressions with es Chapter 5 - The German case system; negation Chapter 6 – The past tense forms Chapter 7 – Adjectives and adverbs; comparative and superlative; als and wie Chapter 8 - Subordinate and relative clauses; commas; present participles Chapter 9 – Werden and its different uses; passive voice; future and future perfect Chapter 10 – Personal pronouns; reflexive pronouns; appositions and phrases Chapter 11 – Prepositions; pronominal phrases; other uses of pronouns; word formation of nouns Chapter 12 – Subjunctive I; reported speech Chapter 13 – Subjunctive II; conditional sentences Chapter 14 – Extended participial phrases Chapter 15 – Ersatzpassiv constructions and other fake passive constructions Chapter 16 – Strategies for dealing with longer and older texts Additional practice texts

Alexander Burdumy is Director of the International Center at Offenburg University of Applied Sciences.