The chair of English Language Education would like to invite you to a guest lecture by Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann (University of Würzburg). The lecture takes place on Thursday July 1st 2021, 10-12 via Zoom. Please find a short description of Prof. Eisenmann's talk below:

Brooklyn (2009) recounts the story of a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to the United States in the early 1950s. In his novel Colm Tóibín explores themes such as geographical and cultural displacement of the foreign other as well as the dislocation of the subject at home and abroad. This typical experience of emigration creates a complexity of identity, the hybrid and hyphenated identities as well as the difficulty in finding a sense of belonging.
This paper, firstly, aims to address why Irish migration and hybrid identity should be included as a central topic in the EFL classroom and, secondly, explores how Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn can be used effectively and purposefully in the context of intercultural and cross-cultural teaching and learning approaches.

The lecture is part of the German Irish Studies Itinerary (GISI), hosted by the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS). Find more information on GISI under this link. Everyone is welcome. If you want to join us, please send an email to Daniel Becker.

Currently, video games are witnessing a ‘golden age’. With titles such as Minecraft or GTA V selling over 200 million copies worldwide, they have become a most prominent part of popular culture today. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that video games are often frequented by children and teenagers, too. As the most recent JIM study shows (Medienpädagogischer Forschungsverband 2020: 54), 68% of the studied 12 to 19-year-olds play digital games daily or several times a week, while another 25% deal with them on a monthly basis. In a younger generation, in other words, digital games have become a force of entertainment to be reckoned with.

And yet, video games are more than just entertainment: games also afford numerous opportunities for learning and can be used to foster key competences in English language education. In my presentation, I will provide an overview over some of these learning potentials, by looking at concrete game examples and their affordances in the EFL classroom. Additionally, I will explore ways and approaches to implement games in teaching practice, since, so far, the question of how to work with video games has hardly been explored on a systematic level. In this context, the presentation will also deal with issues and challenges that go along with using this digital medium in an EFL teaching environment.

Are you writing your MA-Thesis in English language education at the moment, or are you thinking about doing so in the near future?

If so, the ELE team of the WWU Münster would like to invite you to join our new  MA-Colloquium. The colloquium is open for all MA-students and aims at offering you:

• an opportunity to present your work in progress to your fellow students and lecturers
• individualised feedback on your work in progress
• an opportunity to connect and exchange ideas with other MA-thesis candidates
• general input on how to write your MA-thesis

Are you writing your BA or Med thesis in English Language Education this semester? Then sign up for our workshops!

How (not) to write your BA/MEd thesis
28.04.2021, 18:00-19:30 (via Zoom)
(Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Reckermann)

"Ich muss jetzt echt mal anfangen" - wissenschaftliches Schreiben meistern
05.05.2021, 18:00-19:30 (via Zoom)
(Anika Marxl & Marius Ritter)

Information regarding the registration can be found on the poster below (see pdf-fyle).

Am 02.03.2021 veranstaltete das Forum Fremdsprachendidaktik den 9. Nachmittag der Fremdsprachen.
Bedingt durch die Corona-Pandemie fand die jährliche Lehrer*innenfortbildung dieses Jahr erstmalig digital statt. Nach einer kurzen Begrüßung nahmen die Teilnehmenden an zwei verschiedenen Workshops teil. Ganz nach dem diesjährigen Motto: Spotlights in Foreign Language Education wurden Workshops mit einem breiten Spektrum an Themen angeboten.

Wir möchten uns an dieser Stelle bei der überwältigenden Zahl der Teilnehmenden bedanken: ganze 335 Anmeldungen sind im Vorfeld getätigt worden! Diese große Resonanz und auch das durchweg positive Feedback haben uns sehr gefreut. Ein herzliches Dankeschön auch an alle Workshopleitenden sowie an alle Teammitglieder, die mit ihrer tatkräftigen Unterstützung diese Veranstaltung möglich gemacht haben.

Wir freuen uns auch schon, Sie alle bei unserem nächsten Nachmittag der Fremdsprachen - hoffentlich in Präsenz - am 02.03.2022 begrüßen zu dürfen!

We are very happy to announce that Jens Folkerts will join our Team from February onwards. He has been a full-time teacher for several years and is now starting his PhD focusing on listening comprehension and the development of new test designs for high stakes exams.

You can find more information on his website.

We are very pleased to announce that Stewart Campbell has joined our team.
Originally from Los Angeles, he has studied in both Germany and the United States and is a fully-certified secondary school teacher in the subjects English and history at the Gymnasium/Gesamtschule level.
He is currently a PhD student within the QLB Projekt Basiscurriculum Heterogenität [de] and will support our department in this area.

You can find more information about Stewart Campbell on his website.

Hosted by the Finnish team, the 3rd partner meeting took place online on 21st/22nd September 2020. The international expert group discussed how to proceed in times of the pandemic with regards to both project coordination and collaboration with local schools. Although virtual exchange certainly cannot replace face-to-face collaboration in Finnland, the meeting was highly productive and proved to be a highlight in the academic calendar of everybody involved. As a result, the project enters its next stage, promising to provide concrete resources to make bilingual education a more inclusive reality for all.

After a short hiatus over the summer, the Erasmus Plus Project TOOLS has taken up work again in its partner meeting on September 22nd. Due to the Corona crisis, this meeting had to take place via Zoom (see photo).

During the meeting, the different partners of the project provided a short update on their work in progress and arranged a timeline for their contributions in the upcoming weeks. The project, which deals with questions of inclusion and diversity in a digital age, has just entered the phase of materials development. The team of English language education at the WWU Münster (represented by Frauke Matz, Daniel Becker and Anika Marxl) will also contribute some learning materials to the project. The materials to be developed aim at assisting teachers in dealing with different forms of diversity in their classrooms and will be collected on a project-platform soon.

We are excited to welcome Prof. Dr. Julia Reckermann, who has just joined our team in January 2020.

Please find more information here.

Das TOOLS Projekt hat begonnen.

Im Rahmen dieses praxisnahen, anwendungsbezogenen europäischen Kooperationsprojektes sind Daniel Becker & Frauke Matz (Fachdidaktik Englisch), Corinna Schopphoff & Martin Jungwirth (ZfL) und Ralf Kerstgens (ZfsL Münster) nach Opole gereist.
Mit diesem Kick-off Meeting vom 04.11.-06.11.2019 beginnen wir ein phasenübergreifendes Projekt, das im Zeichen von Inklusion und Digitalisierung steht.
Wir freuen uns sehr auf diese Zusammenarbeit!

We were delighted to host the 2nd partner meeting of our ADiBE project from Thursday, 24th until Saturday, 26th October 2020.

It was a pleasure for the Münster team to welcome the representatives of the Austrian (Silvia Bauer-Marschalinger, Christiane Dalton-Puffer & Helen Heaney), Finnish (Tarja Nikula-Jäntti & Kristiina Skinnari), Italian (Teresa Ting), Spanish (María Luisa Pérez Canado, Diego Rascón Moreno, Trinidad Jerez Montoy, Antonio Vincente Casas Pedrosa) and UK teams (Do Coyle & Kim Bower) as well as Dominik Rumlich (Germany).

In a joint event hosted by the TEFL team and the Chair of English, Postcolonial & Media Studies, author Olumide Popoola delivered an engaging creative writer's talk titled "Undo Me! Language, Form, and Queer Potentiality" as part of this year's "Postcolonial Narrations" graduate forum. Popoola engaged with her novel "When We Speak of Nothing" and explored the idea of how form and Yoruba folklore provide means to express alternative understandings of youth culture and transgender identities. With the TEFL team, Popoola was also in talks about further projects that center on teaching Nigerian texts in German high schools.

We are very pleased to announce that Marius Ritter has now joined our team.
He is a PhD student within the QLB Projekt Videobasierte Lehrmodule als Mittel der Theorie-Praxis-Integration and will support us within this project.

You can find more information here.