An Interdisciplinary Approach to a Business German Curriculum: The Texas Tech University Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUNDCan a single course in Business German give students the marketable skills they will need for careers in the global marketplace?Although few of us would answer with a resounding -yes,‖ most German departments have extremely restricted course offerings for students interested in the practical applications of foreign language study. 38 Exceptions are universities such as Georgia Tech, which specialize in language instruction for professional purposes, and large universities such as the University of Rhode Island or the University of Texas at Austin, which are capable of offering separate language tracks for students interested in business and technology.The vast majority of colleges and universities, on the other hand, are unable to offer more than a single course on professional German for a host of reasons: limited faculty members, limited student enrollments in advanced language courses, faculty reluctance to teach new courses in outside fields and unwillingness to sacrifice traditional literary programs, fear of -watering down‖ a liberal arts curriculum, lack of administrative and financial support, and, 38 A special survey by Valters Nollendorfs in Monatshefte (1991) listing the Business German programs and courses in the USA and Canada identified 97 departments with a total 134 courses in Business German.Although somewhat out of date, this survey reveals that most programs, especially those of smaller universities and colleges, offer only a single course in business or commercial German, while larger programs generally offer two semesters of Business German in preparation for an internship abroad or for the Prüfung Wirtschaftsdeutsch International.A similar survey by Annette Koeppel, Christiane Keck, and Sabine Schroeder in 1988 revealed essentially the same conclusion: -[The courses] range from a single course on the fourth semester college German level to, more frequently, a single course on the fifth or sixth semester level‖ (Keck, Introduction 4).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".