Research

Project Description

Based on the question of how teachers in the second phase of English teacher training perceive their own professionalization process and how their development can be described, a group of teachers in preparatory service was scientifically accompanied over the entire period of the second training phase.

Project Details

Designed as a longitudinal panel analysis, the study employs qualitative content analysis methods to examine aspects of development and professionalization of eight in-service teacher trainees. The qualitative data (narrative and retrospective interviews, written lesson plans, written reflections on practice) were collected at key points in time (beginning, middle, career entry) and related to reflection processes in the context of planning, implementing and evaluating lessons based on the insights into the perceived development aspects.

By comparing the data sets with and among each other, development aspects and reflection processes can be structured and systematized, providing new insights into the two-phase training structure of English language teachers.

Project Description

The project focuses on explorative research into the reading processes and sense-making of lower-intermediate learners of English. In the quasi-experimental study, learners in grades 5-8 are observed reading an authentic English picture book in groups of three.

Project Details

Employing introspective methods, participants are asked to verbalize what they understand and how they establish this understanding by relating the verbal and visual codes. Following this, they take part in an interview focussing on the relation of verbal and pictorial codes, story constituents as well as the substance of content, and the ambiguity and indeterminacy of symbolic representations respectively.

As a follow-up to the quasi-experimental setting, teachers of learner groups in Year 7 design lessons based on the key aspects identified in the interviews at three different levels of difficulty.  As data sets, we collect both the teachers’ reflections for (planning) and on (evaluation) action as well as learner products (multimodal texts). To incorporate the learners’ perspectives, retrospective qualitative interviews are conducted with groups of learners from each participating learner group.

With Prof. Dr. Roger Dale Jones , Klagenfurt

Project Description

Historical narratives can function as resonance spaces in which individual reflections on cultural codes and identity constructions take shape. This project investigates that premise through learners' engagement with authentic texts from the archive "The Many Voices of Texas" on nineteenth-century migration.

Project Details

Designed as an exploratory case study, the project draws on latent thematic analysis to trace how twenty secondary school students in Hesse negotiate cultural values, norms, and identity constructions as they work with these materials. Their engagement was captured through text-productive tasks and documented via videography, learning products, and semi-structured interviews, allowing the mediation of historical narratives to be linked to the development of communicative skills and critical reflection.

The resulting analysis focuses on the tension between romanticized historical narratives and the lived hardships of migration, revealing how students construct "as-if" learning worlds in response to this friction. In doing so, the study offers insight into how authentic historical materials can foster "futures literacy", helping learners deconstruct linguistic identity constructions and actively shape the narrative structures of their own future.

With Prof. Dr. Jan Alber , Gießen

Project Description

The interpretation of a text is inevitably shaped by the reader's individual background, giving rise to readings that can diverge considerably from one another. Drawing on metahermeneutics, this project examines how positionality shapes the attribution of ethos to narrative characters, narrators, and authors.

Project Details

As a theoretical and qualitative investigation, the study draws on the concepts of experiential background and intersectionality to unpack the nuances of ethos attribution and narrative relatability. A short qualitative study, built around discussions of diverging text interpretations, is used to trace the interplay between readers' psychological predispositions and specific narrative techniques, such as paratextual features, plot development, and storyworld aspects, right at the intersection of reader positionality and text structure.

From here, the relatability of experiences is categorized through retrospective, prospective, and speculative relations, which together help explain why interpretations of the same text so often diverge. This offers new insight into how individual experiential backgrounds and intersectional identity categories shape the construction of meaning, both in professional life and in the classroom.

Publications

• with Alber, Jan (2026c). "Understanding how we Understand: The Role of Metahermeneutics in Narrative Analysis and Teaching". Journal of Literary Semantics . https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2026-3002

Project Description

Motivated by the question of how shifting mindsets within the foreign language classroom can contribute to a more climate-resilient and peaceful future, this study investigates the role of English as a medium for climate change literacy and global citizenship.

Project Details

Set within a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) framework, the project takes the form of a qualitative case study built around a specialized teaching unit for twenty-eight high school students in Germany. Following the unit, thematic analysis is applied to language tasks centered on IPCC-calibrated terminology and to semi-structured group interviews, tracing how students develop scientific literacy and media criticality alongside their ability to deconstruct media representations of climate politics and take part in transnational dialogue.

Bringing students' linguistic awareness and critical attitudes into dialogue with one another surfaces clear connections between language proficiency, scientific literacy, and constructive global cooperation, pointing to foreign language education as a genuine tool for peace-building and for cultivating an informed global citizenry.

With Prof. Dr. Julian Ernst , Giessen

Project Description

Video streaming platforms and their algorithmic recommendation engines increasingly shape how young people encounter media, raising the question of what this means for those training to become English teachers. This project investigates the role of anglophone content in the identity development of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher students.

Project Details

The research combines quantitative surveys with qualitative interviews and focus groups, capturing the interplay between algorithmic curation, media consumption, and professional identity construction. Both strands of data were collected from a sample of EFL teacher students across multiple German universities, capturing their awareness of recommendation engines alongside their lived experiences with anglophone streaming content.

Bringing the survey results into conversation with these in-depth qualitative findings makes visible how algorithmic curation shapes the cultural and linguistic environments of future teachers, offering a window onto the broader intersection of media socialization, technological mediation, and the professional identity development of aspiring educators.

Project Description

This pending research project, which started in the late 1990s, investigates the challenges and possibilities involved in fostering communicative creativity and improvisation within structured EFL learning environments. It examines how teachers can cultivate lively, spontaneous student talk-in-interaction within task-oriented instructional frameworks and how these unplanned yet productive student exchanges contribute to the development of communicative proficiency in the target language.

Project Details

Adopting transdisciplinary and holistic perspectives, the project conceptualizes EFL classrooms as complex dynamic systems, where communicative tasks of increasing complexity and difficulty encourage more active, flexible, creative, and ultimately competent learner participation in the target language.

The project employs multiple research methodologies, such as classroom action research, design-based research, case studies, micro-analytic discourse analysis, and qualitative interviews with teachers and students, to design, implement, and evaluate improvisational practices and creative tasks. The first research monograph to emerge from this project, Improvisierendes Sprechen im Fremdsprachenunterricht (Kurtz, 2001), is now considered a pioneering work in design-based TEFL research in Germany (Delius, 2022).

The findings emphasize the importance of integrating both scripted and unscripted instruction within EFL classrooms. This balance highlights the need for teacher professional development that fosters not only strong theoretical understanding and pedagogical expertise but also the capacity for adaptive, responsive action in instructional settings that combine predictability with spontaneity.

Delius, Katharina (2022). Fachdidaktische Innovationen im Unterricht anstoßen: Eine Design-Based Research-Studie zur Förderung der Sprechkompetenz im Englischunterricht. Educational Design Research 6, 2, 1-38.

Kurtz, Jürgen (2001). Improvisierendes Sprechen im Fremdsprachenunterricht. Eine Untersuchung zur Entwicklung spontansprachlicher Handlungskompetenz in der Zielsprache . Tübingen: Narr. [post-doctoral dissertation]