Marianna V. Ryshina-Pankova

Assistant Professor of German, Director of German Curriculum
Age: 39
Hometown: Moscow, Russia
Education: B.A. Lawrence University, Linguistics and German; Ph.D. Georgetown University, German Applied Linguistics
Area of research: Developing advanced literacy abilities
Time at Georgetown: 6 years
Courses: Language teaching methodology, literacy development, all levels of German

How did you narrow your focus to German and literacy development?
I’ve always been interested in languages and linguistics. In Moscow, my major was Germanic Languages and Linguistics, so Germanic languages included German and English. My primary language was English — that’s how I ended up in the U.S. as an exchange student.

What’s interesting is how one develops the ability in a foreign language to function in a professional context. That was at some point a challenge for me because I come from another country, so that was one interest. Another was how do proficient, literate speakers use language to develop their ideas.

What are you looking for when you evaluate different texts for the curriculum?
That’s a question that one can spend a whole day, in my case, answering. We look at, to give a brief answer, the topic, the themes that are relevant, salient in the target culture, the German culture, Austrian culture, then we look at the genres of these materials because different genres can be used at various points in the curriculum. We start with simpler genres, like narratives, and then we move toward other, more challenging types, like explanations and argumentative discourse, like expositions and discussions. Every time we develop a unit, we ask ourselves, what are the important themes within the bigger theme and how these themes can be represented or explored with the students.

What is it like to work in one of Georgetown’s smaller departments?
I feel it only is an advantage because we’re not super small, but we’re small enough to have good relationships and connections between different faculty members for collaborative types of work and everyone can be sort of onboard. That’s very important in my work, because I’m the curriculum person, and it’s been the tradition in the German Department to involve everyone in the curricula projects. That’s part of the explanation for the success of the curriculum revision that was undertaken 15 years ago now. You know how it’s hard to change things, and you can only change if members of the department support the endeavor. It’s not only the number, it’s the kind of people you have, but the number plays a role as well.

What would be your ideal course to teach?
I think the course we have in the curriculum are maybe not ideal, but they are very well constructed because what they integrate is the instruction of content areas and certain cultural aspects with very meaningful instruction of language. So not separate, but basically analysis of language features and how they contribute to the meanings that are produced in texts. In graduate interests, discourse analysis.

Interview by Emma Hinchliffe