Summer semester 2016

Lecture "Text Competence: Comprehension - Production - Instruction"

Text competence comprises the abilities to read and understand texts, to produce texts and to learn from texts. After a short introduction to the basic concepts of text linguistics as the study of meaningful linguistic units beyond the sentence level, this lecture provides a comprehensive survey of theories and models of text comprehension and text comprehensibility, text production, writing competence development and writing instruction. Participants will develop an awareness of their own cognitive and metacognitive processes during text reception and text production, both in their L1 and their L2, and will obtain guidance on how to improve their own critical reading and writing skills. Special emphasis will be placed on writing as a reflective practice and thus as a means to take a more critical stance to one's own and other texts, to develop one's own position on controversial issues and to generate new ideas. The lecture will conclude with didactical implications for writing instruction in secondary and tertiary education.

Seminar "Globalization and Migration as Challenges for Applied Linguistics"

Globalization and migration have led to multilingual societies and increasing demands on our abilities to communicate across languages and cultures. On the one hand, these developments call for plurilingualism. On the other hand, there is a tendency to circumvent the cost end effort involved in developing plurilingualism among individuals and multilingualism in societies and institutions and resort to English as the lingua franca of international communication instead. Language, however, is not only a means of communication but also a means of individual knowledge construction, of gaining insights and of critical assessment. In these cognitive processes, our mother tongue (or L1) plays a crucial role. Whenever the use of a foreign language seems to overburden our cognitive systems, we naturally resort to our L1. Against this background, this seminar will explore the linguistic challenges our societies are faced with through globalization and migration in all areas. Special emphasis will be placed on language policies in supranational institutions and in educational systems.

Participants are invited to develop their own research questions within this thematic range. Questions that can be addressed in the seminar comprise, but are not limited to, the following: Multilingualism in European institutions: Cost and benefits; Are educational policies in European countries in conformance with expectations raised by the European Commission? Is English-Medium Instruction (EMI) the best strategy to cater for international students and foster student mobility? What should EMI ideally look like from a didactical perspective? What is the relationship between EMI and different forms of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)? What empirical evidence has been provided for the usefulness of different forms of CLIL for language development on the one hand and the acquisition of subject-domain knowledge on the other hand? What language(s) should be used in multilingual classrooms? What role does children's L1 play for their academic development? What language policies are needed in schools and universities to best foster migrants' and their children's scholastic and academic development? Should literacy in several languages be fostered in parallel or in a sequential order, e.g., in such a manner that skills acquired in the stronger language(s) can subsequently be transferred to weaker languages?

Participants are encouraged to also conduct their own empirical studies, e.g., by interviewing refugees on the language and cultural barriers they have encountered, their experience with language courses and their suggestions for improvement of current practices.