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Professor Corl retires

June 17, 2015

Professor Corl retires

Professor Kathryn Corl

Kathryn Corl, Associate Professor of German, will retire at the end of the 2014-15 academic year. She was honored on May 2nd during a Retirement Reception. For almost three decades, Corl touched many lives at Ohio State, and the celebration gave everyone the opportunity to share stories and express appreciation for the lessons learned and the love of teaching she inspired.

In 2005, Corl won the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring in Humanities. According to one student nominator, she is “an outstanding classroom teacher who really cares about the success of her students.”

Corl co-authored Sprechen wir Deutsch! (1985, 1989, 1992) and Übergänge: Texte verfasssen (1994). Her research and teaching specializations include psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, technology and materials development, online learning, testing and evaluation, teacher development and language program direction.

Throughout her tenure, Corl has regularly adhered to the philosophy that teaching German should be an interactive and collaborative activity. For example, she was engaged in a teacher development initiative of the AATG and Goethe Institute known as GOLDEN (German Online Distance Education Network). In 2008, she secured a TELR grant to create an online, semi-self-paced program to help students gain better comprehension of German novels. “My goal,” she says, “is to give students an interactive interface that helps them notice targeted grammatical features in excerpts of connected discourse and then, through a series of guided steps, lead them to use the forms accurately in their own free narrations of the storyline.” Professor Corl’s students will miss her knack of putting them at ease and taking the fear out of language learning while keeping standards high.

Her success in securing federal funding and coordinating the Collaborative Articulation and Assessment Project and the MultiCAT Multimedia Adaptive Language Proficiency Testing Project put the Department on the national landscape of German language teaching and learning.

We will all miss her dedication, energy, and enthusiasm and wish her only the best in the years to come.