Research Projects

"Umbrüche gestalten" - Integrating German as a Second Language into Teacher Training Programs

From March 2014 to February 2017, the work group German as a Foreign/Second Language will work on a project developing training modules in German as a second language for the state’s teacher training programs. This is part of a larger project including all universities of Lower Saxony. At the university of Oldenburg, the work group will be developing a module for economics teachers.
Collaborators: Juliana Goschler (Local Project Leader), Anne-Kristin Cordes, Snizhana Maksymchuk.
Funding: Mercator Institute.

Quantitative Corpus Linguistics and Second Language Research

We are in the advanced planning stage for a research project on the application of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods to second language corpora. We are currently assembling a corpus of elicited German, Russian, Polish, and Turkish narratives by bilingual and second language speakers of Russian/German, Polish/German, and Turkish/German between the ages of 6 and 30, and a matched corpus of German monolingual speakers.
Collaborators: Juliana Goschler, Anatol Stefanowitsch, Sarah Meitzner (collection of German monolingual corpus), Christoph Schroeder, Till Woerfel (collection of Turkish corpora), Stefanie Haberzettl and Mirja Gruhn (assistance in collecting the German-Turkish corpus), Lars Behnke (collection of the Russian/German and Polish/German corpus).

Additional Research Interests

My research interests include cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, bilingualism, metaphor and figurative language, spatial language, and the formation and comprehension of complex words.

2013-12-01

Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association

The German Cognitive Linguistics Association has just published the first volume of its yearbook, edited by Anatol Stefanowitsch and myself.

2013-11-25

Mercator Grant

The universities of Lower Saxony have successfully applied for a grant from the Mercator foundation to develop training modules in German as a second language for the state’s teacher training programs. At the university, my work group will be developing a module for economics teachers.

2013-11-01

Volume on Variation and Change in the Encoding of Motion Events

John Benjamins has just published a collection of papers on variation and change in the encoding of motion events, edited by Anatol Stefanowitsch and myself and based on the theme session we organized at the DGKL 2010 in Bremen.

2013-04-01

New Position at the University of Oldenburg/DGKL

I have just started working in my new position as Assistant Professor of German as a Foreign/Second Language at the University of Oldenburg’s German Department.