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.

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]

This research project explores the lived experience of teachers who have studied English at university. What do they retain? How do they feel about specific incidents they recall? What has been most meaningful to them? Or more broadly: What is it like to undergo pre-service language teacher education in Germany? The latter provision is a thoroughly investigated area within the larger context of teacher education, however not from a holistic and phenomenological point of view. The research design is based on interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al. 2022), foregrounding what is experienced as meaningful by the individual. By means of episodic-narrative interviews (Flick 2011; Schütze 1983), English teachers from across Germany (n = 20) were asked to report on their university experience. The technique features considerable openness so as to elicit what is deemed noteworthy by the respondent themself. The interviewees relate important events and, crucially, evince strong evaluations of specific occurrences they recall. Among numerous findings, the study reveals individual orientations toward different educational aims. On one end of the spectrum, teachers display an appreciation of generally formative experiences and personal growth (“Bildung”), on the other end, and far more frequently, they express an unfulfilled desire to be trained in utilitarian ways for what awaits them as teachers in the foreign language classroom (“Ausbildung”).

• Flick, Uwe (2011). Das episodische Interview. In: Gertrud Oelerich and Hans-Uwe Otto (eds.): Empirische Forschung und soziale Arbeit. Ein Studienbuch. 1st ed. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften / Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 273–280.
• Schütze, Fritz (1983). Biographieforschung und narratives Interview. In: Neue Praxis 13 (3), 283–293.
• Smith, Jonathan; Flowers, Paul; Larkin, Michael (2022). Interpretative phenomenological analysis. Theory, method and research. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage.