Jamie Rankin is a Senior Lecturer in the German Department. Since 2015 he has also served as the Director of the Princeton Center for Language Study, which provides instructors of all languages on campus with workshops, reading groups, resources for conferences and research, and opportunities for ongoing professional development.
His publications include numerous articles in Die Unterrichtspraxis on topics ranging from teacher training to extensive L2 reading and classroom-based Action Research, and a study of teacher cognition in the Modern Language Journal. As a presenter for the AATG, he has given workshops on interactive tasks for L2 classrooms, assessment strategies, and vocabulary training.
Jamie has collaborated with colleagues and graduate students in developing an online textbook for beginning German. The textbook facilitates acquisition of high-frequency lexical items in German, i.e., the words and collocations students will actually encounter in authentic texts and interactions, as opposed to the standard items found in commercial textbooks. It combines multiple modes of vocabulary presentation and systematic review across chapters, classroom review and reinforcement, and student-initiated online flashcards or other review systems. He is also co-author of the widely-used book for intermediate and advanced German, the Handbuch zur deutschen Grammatik, and its accompanying Arbeitsheft.
A recipient of numerous development grants, he has created a website that catalogues classroom tasks for TA’s, a Google Map using input from students in Princeton-in-Munich, and an online multimodal proficiency/placement exam for applicants to the Berlin Consortium.