Development of curricula for cross-faculty German courses in Serbian universities: retrospect and glimpse into the future

Abstract

The challenges that today’s labour market presents to graduates require us to consider what universities and higher education institutions can do to prepare students for their tasks in the best possible way, as well as whether German as a foreign language classes at university level can contribute to this and what the corresponding curricula should look like as a result. The aim of this article is therefore to analyse the current state of German as a foreign language teaching in higher education using as an example the situation in Serbia with the intention of making a paradigmatic contribution to the general didactic-methodological discussion and to the improvement of study conditions and the professional, disciplinary and skills-orientation of German lessons. The aim is to determine whether the performance requirements for students have changed over the years and, in particular, whether the framework curriculum for German language teaching published in 2010 as part of an international university project has been well received, i.e. to what extent its principles have been incorporated into the German teaching curricula and implemented by academic lecturers. In order to determine how the choice of foreign languages and the allocation of lessons has changed, the article first analyses the current curricula in Serbian universities and then compares the findings with the results of a study conducted in 2008. The result of the study is that the curricula give an important role to professional and subject-relatedness, but that the principles of the above-mentioned framework curriculum have not yet been implemented in all curricula despite some progress; there is also a reduction in the number of foreign languages available for selection and the number of hours set by university and college administrations, and this has a negative impact on the language level and language competences of students. Further efforts are therefore needed to ensure that competence-orientation is more clearly anchored in the curricula for German as a foreign language teaching in higher education: This requires close cooperation between university administration and teaching staff so that students can be guaranteed high-quality language training that meets the requirements of both the market and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.