Current research projects

Feeling - Thinking - Speaking in Elementary School

The project "Fühlen Denken Sprechen in der Grundschule" (FDS-G) is funded within the framework of the BMBF call for proposals "Sprachliche Bildung in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft". The project is designed as a cooperation between the University of Kassel, the Leuphana University of Lüneburg and the Technical University of Braunschweig.

The aim of the research project is to develop, test and evaluate the effectiveness of a training program for teachers and caregivers on language support integrated into everyday life in all-day schools. Based on a topic that is meaningful for children, the language support strategies are linked to emotions, so that a connection between linguistic and emotional learning is established. The research focus at the Kassel site is primarily on the language skills of students in the second grade. Using various language support approaches and implicit mediation strategies, the development of linguistic skills in speaking about emotions is being researched. Based on the previous project "BiSS Project: Feeling - Thinking - Speaking", the continuation project will develop further training for the primary level, along a new focus, with the development of children's everyday language skills with regard to educational language.

Methodologically, the research project is designed as an intervention study, with quantitative and qualitative surveys. A pre-post follow-up design will determine the effectiveness of the training. There are three key phases in the project. First, (1.) the training "Fühlen Denken Sprechen - Grundschule" (Feeling, Thinking, Speaking - Elementary School) will be designed for educators, for the use of language-promoting actions in everyday situations, in dialogic speaking about emotions together with children. Subsequently, the training will be implemented by means of (2.) a training and a practice-accompanying implementation together with the pedagogical specialists. In a third step, (3.) the effectiveness of the training will be tested by means of observations of the linguistic interaction behavior of teachers and caregivers as well as measurements of linguistic and emotional abilities of monolingual and multilingual students.

Topic Finder - BMBF Empirical Educational Research (empirische-bildungsforschung-bmbf.de)

JuNaKo/ NaLeKo

In the JuNaKo (JUnction-NArration-KOrpuslinguistic) project, the goal is to investigate the written language acquisition of junctors, taking into account precisely the aspects of use mentioned above, and to reveal and discuss typical acquisition trajectories, individual differences, and structural acquisition difficulties (cf. Binanzer/Hirschmann/Langlotz 2022). These specifics also pose a challenge for corpus linguistic annotation, which has to be done on the different levels (lexical, syntactic, semantic).

Part of the project was the construction of the Narration Learner Corpus (NaLeKo), which includes general grammatical and acquisition-specific analyses as well as corpus linguistic annotation for lexical, syntactic, and semantic annotation of the use of junctors. The corpus is composed of written narrative texts written in German (N=288) by children and adolescents aged seven to seventeen in grades 2-9. The texts are from monolinguals who grew up with L1 German (N=164), multilinguals who grew up with L1 German (N=55), and those who grew up with German as L2 (69). The texts were elicited into picture stimuli or specific writing tasks. The project is a cooperation with Prof. Dr. Anja Binanzer (University of Hannover) and Dr. Hagen Hirschmann (HU Berlin). The corpus will be published soon.

Binanzer, A.; Hirschmann, H.; Langlotz, M. (2022): Narrative functions of temporal junctors - learner texts and children's and youth literature in corpus linguistic comparison. In: Mesch, B.; Uhl, B. (Eds.): Temporality - empirical approaches to the acquisition of temporality. Münster: Waxmann. 175-198