Reading practice: Kaiser Karl der Große
Kaiser Karl der Große
Introduction
These Learning Activities are to be used for a Reading Class in German after you have completed approximately 30 hours of tuition.
Objectives
You will revise and practice past participles, and you will learn vocabulary relevant to a particular period in history.
Activity 1: Get a general idea of the text
This activity is to give you a general idea of the content of a text. You will first read and listen to it, then make notes and learn vocabulary.
Instruction
Open the document Kaiser Karl der Große.pdf [17KB].
In a second window open Kaiser Karl der Große.mp3 [2,852KB].
Read the text while listening to the recording to get a general idea of the content.
Listen to the recording again, looking (and listening) out for proper names of people and places in the first paragraph.
Highlight them (using the tool in Word), then copy and paste them in the box below.
Get a general idea of the content of the first paragraph and make as many points as you can:
For example:
• Who is this text about?
• Where is he buried?
Write your answers and make extra notes in the box below:
Mark, look up and learn new vocabulary:
Using copy and paste functions, place any new vocabulary in the box below.
Look up translations in an on-line dictionary, for example LEO German-English Dictionary
Learn the new vocabulary.
Test your vocabulary
Test yourself on the new vocabulary that you have just learnt by clicking on the links below and doing two gap fill activities:
1. JCloze: Kaiser Karl der Große 1.htm [41KB]
2. JCloze: Kaiser Karl der Große 2.htm [38KB].
Activity 2: Grammar Practice
This activity will revise the past participle and practise translating past participles in context.
Instruction
Read the text used in activity 1 again. Kaiser Karl Der Grosse [pdf. 17kb]
Mark all the past participles that you can find and then copy them into the box below.
Using past participles
Looking at the text again, identify and write down meaningful sentences containing a past participle with subject, auxiliary, object and past participle, in the box below:
for example: Köln und Mainz sind mit seinem Namen verbunden.
Functions of Past Participles
What functions do these past participles have?
Are they part of a passive voice, a compound tense (perfect tense, past perfect) or just used as an adjective?
sind verbunden:
"verbunden" functions as
hatte gekrönt:
"gekrönt" functions as
haben gedient:
"gedient" functions as
haben bekommen:
"bekommen" functions as
war vereiningt:
"vereinigt" functions as
Activity 3: Translate „Kaiser Karl der Große“
In this activity, you will look at the meaning of some words in context, and then translate the text into English.
Instruction
Using an on-line dictionary like LEO German-English Dictionary translate the whole text into English.
Before starting check the exact meaning of the following words in context by choosing an option from the drop down list:
line 3: Er wurde der Gründer
line 16: Germanentum
line 25: Vor über elfhundert Jahren
line 26: Erst mit seinem Tode
Now translate the entire text. Write in the box below.
Activity 4: Responding to the text: answering questions in German
Now that you have read and translated the text about Charlemagne, you will check your understanding by answering some questions in German.
Instruction
Answer the following questions in German. Write your answers in the box below.
Fragen
1 Wann begann die politische Geschichte der Deutschen?
2 Was gehörte zu seinem Reich?
3 Wie nennen die Franzosen ihren Kaiser?
4 Wo ist das Grab Karls des Großen?
5 Welchen Ideen diente das Universalreich?
6 Wer krönte Karl den Großen zum Kaiser?
7 Was sind "gute Europäer"?
8 Wann starb Kaiser Karl der Große?
Would you like to review the main points?
References:
Photo: by kind permission of Pit Siebigs
© Christine Eckhard-Black / University of Oxford Language Centre / 2008