Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom
Silke Mentchen, a graduate of Cologne University, has been teaching German as a foreign language at all levels in tertiary education since 1994. Apart from her position in the German Section, she is also fellow, Director of Studies and tutor at Magdalene College.
She is responsible for the curriculum of German undergraduate degree courses taught in the Faculty.
Silke Mentchen teaches and examines at all levels, with a special interest in translation studies and beginners' language courses. She has developed on-line material, both for the Faculty’s teaching of translation (see here), and for potential students of languages, see here for examples: German modules for HE+ and Just-in-Time Grammar, as well as on-line A2- and AS level material for Villiers Park.
Together with a colleague, she has published Upgrade Your German, a German grammar exercise book, Speed Up your German , a book focussing on common errors, and articles on the methodology and pedagogy of on-line resources, see here and here.
Silke Mentchen is the Faculty’s adviser for the Prince’s Teaching Institute, the Faculty’s coordinator for whynotlang@cam and the Section’s coordinator for HE+. Further Widening Participation Projects involve the organisation of a series of short video clips on German A level topics, see here: CCARL. She has been a jury member for the annual DAAD/IMLR German writing competition since 2015 and a judge on the national final Modern Languages Spelling Bee competition since 2017.
In the context of the Sozialgeschichte lecture series for the German Section, she has organised the involvement of German writers with the support of Queen Mary University College, London. Previous speakers were:
2007: Sibylle Lewitscharoff and Angelika Overath
2008: Björn Kern
2009: Matthias Politycki and Jan Böttcher
2010: Kai Weyand
2011: Christopher Kloeble
2012: David Wagner
2013: Kristof Magnusson
2014: Thomas Meinecke and Ilija Trojanow
2015: Peter Schneider
2016: Ulf Stolterfoht
2018: Alissa Walser and Judith Kuckart
Silke Mentchen has presented papers at the IDT (Internationale Deutschlehrer Tagung) twice, on using CALL and on using metaphors in foreign language teaching. She has organised a workshop on multilingualism in 2017 funded by the Cambridge DAAD Research Hub. In 2018 she organised a two-day conference “German in multilingiual contexts”, and she is currently the lead organiser for a series of three workshops on German ab initio teaching and learning.
She is also an editor for a book on ab initio language teaching for UCL Press. Publication is planned for December 2022.
- 2022, Ab initio language teaching in British Higher Education: The case of German. UCL Press
- 2021, ‘University of Cambridge Modern and Medieval Languages Response to COVID-19’ In: Radic et al, The world universities’ response to COVID-19: remote online language teaching. 307-320
- 2017, with A. Künzl-Snodgrass: Speed up your German, Routledge
- 2005 and 2013, Just in Time Grammar (online)
- 2003, with A. Künzl-Snodgrass: Upgrade your German, Routledge
Further publications:
- Article "Just in time Grammar: Writing an online programme"
- Article "Just in time Grammar: eine Zwischenbilanz" in Sabine Dengscherz, Martin Businger & Jaroslava Taraskina (Hg.) 2014. Grammatikunterricht zwischen Linguistik und Didaktik.DaF/DaZ lernen und lehren im Spannungsfeld von Sprachwissenschaft, empirischer Unterrichtsforschung und Vermittlungskonzepten.
