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Projects in the Field of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kurtz)

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]