On 4th and 5th April 2019, we will be hosting the conference “Standards, Margins, New Horizons: Teaching Language and Literature in the 21st Century” at Bielefeld University. The conference goes back to a rather vague idea of mine that I had 2 years ago: My mind wished for a conference tackling both great challenges to teaching language(s) and literature(s) that arise in our time:

• Our linguistic and cultural landscapes become ever more complex. Teachers are challenged to prepare their students for immensely complex and diverse communication processes. The New London Group (1996) already sketched these developments, but the challenges are now more pressing than ever.
• At the same time, we are confronted with a growing awareness of the diversity of learner groups. Most likely, learner groups ARE becoming more and more diverse, and the needs of diverse learners need to be met in current and future classrooms.

If we take both challenges together, then teachers today are asked to prepare increasingly diverse learner groups for increasingly complex and diverse communicative landscapes in their future lives. If this doesn’t call for a conference dealing with questions entailed by this!

The “New Horizons” conference brings together scholars from most languages taught at German schools. It has a focus on the old (Latin) and new (English) linguae francae, but also hosts scholars from German and Romance Studies, and even from Music!

In April 2017, I challenged myself “officially” to a new long-term research project. In this project, I investigate linguistic action patterns that arise in the context of cooperative learning in English language classrooms. I have been intruiged by the question of how teachers manage these highly emergent, hard-to-plan cooperative learning phases, i.e. introduce the complex tasks and, most importantly, provide help and motivation along the way.

My article “Brain book buddy boss” published here is the first publication from that project, sketching out some of the basic ideas. Another article is on its way 🙂 Still, I am currently in the challenging phase of collecting classroom data. So far, 15 lessons have been video- and audiotaped (and transcribed), but some more are still yet to come…

A more detailed description of the project can be found here (never mind the acronym, I’m still looking for a nice one!).

After finishing the volume “Communication Forms and Communicative Practices” (I’ll post about this once it has been officially published, currently we’re still waiting for the Library of Congree ID) with Peter Lang Verlag, my colleagues Alexander Brock (Halle), Jana Pflaeging (Bremen / Salzburg) and I have set out on another project: a collected volume on “Genre Emergence”. You can find the Call for Book Chapters here 🙂