Goals

Using German Vocabulary aims to offer a comprehensive, thematically structured vocabulary textbook for all but the very beginning levels of undergraduate instruction in German. The individual units treat topics that expose students to a broad range of vocabulary dealing with the physical, social, cultural, economic and political world. Vocabulary is graded into three levels that reflect frequency, difficulty and degree of usefulness. Exercises and activities are provided to reinforce and aid acquisition. The range of topics covered and the levels of competence addressed allow the book to be integrated into the curriculum in a variety of courses at multiple stages of any undergraduate program.

Because first-year German textbooks typically include a list of vocabulary to learn in each chapter, the acquisition of vocabulary during the first year of college-level instruction in German is relatively straightforward. After the first year, however, it becomes more difficult for instructors and students alike to deal with vocabulary in a systematic manner. Instruction at the intermediate and advanced levels tends to centre around authentic texts in the target language. The vocabulary that students acquire at these levels is thus limited in large part to the vocabulary that occurs in these texts. Using German Vocabulary is a tool for dealing systematically with vocabulary acquisition beyond the first year of instruction.

The past decade has seen the publication of a number of German language textbooks that seek to address the issue of vocabulary acquisition beyond the beginning stages of language learning.

Introduction

This chapter commences with events of the Middle Ordovician, a somewhat arbitrary beginning point in terms of the standard geologic periods but one that makes sense with respect to marine transgressions and sequences of strata in the Southwest. It corresponds to a major unconformity at the end of the Sauk transgression, expressed over wide areas of the Colorado Plateau and indeed of much of the North American craton. In the Southwest, this unconformity and the strata immediately below and above are nowhere better observed than in the Grand Canyon, a classic section in North American geology. In other parts of the Southwest, such as western Utah, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and northern Mexico, this division is arbitrary because marine waters continued to inundate the continental margin even while more central areas became emergent.

This chapter encompasses a major tectonic change in the plate boundary along the western margin of Laurentia. Following the Late Proterozoic rifting and breakup of Rodinia, a passive margin formed along western Laurentia as the two continental fragments drifted slowly apart. Western Laurentia and Antarctica–Australia were separated by a growing ocean basin (Fig. 4.1), presumably fed by a mid-oceanic ridge system. Thus, the overall theme for the Southwest during the first approximately 100 Myr of time represented by this chapter was stability. Not until sometime in the Late Devonian did the first evidence for an active margin appear, i.e. a margin characterized by subduction and by compressional tectonics.