Language & Education
Language competence and foreign language learning are essential for academic and professional success and social participation. This Core Research Area investigates how language skills can be fostered by teachers and materials and what role individual cognitive, motivational and social differences play in this process. It examines mechanisms of internal differentiation, their implementation in adaptive and interactive digital teaching and learning materials, and their effectiveness in authentic school contexts. Another focus of the Core Research Area lies on the effective usage of language in presentation and communication.
The ICALL Research Group focuses on the interface of Computational Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition research.
Selected Research Projects
Aisla: Intelligent language assistant for learning English in everyday situations
Acquiring a foreign language such as English requires a lot of speaking practice, ideally with native speakers in real-life scenarios. In addition, learners should receive direct feedback. In the conventional school context, this is often difficult to realize. The Aisla project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education, aims to develop a mobile app that supports learners in practicing English in real-life situations on a daily basis.
DLTPT: Digitalised c-tests and language learning exercises
In this project, researchers from linguistics, computer science and computational linguistics are developing a platform with digitized placement tests and exercise systems for different languages and levels for universities, schools and other educational institutions. DLTPT systems enable the automated creation of language learning exercises with individualized feedback for learners, including complexity analysis and item analysis, as well as digital placement in C-Test format. DLTPT stands for "digitalised language teaching and proficiency testing".
The platform is continuously being expanded, and new research findings are incorporated into system development. The concept is user-oriented; language-, level- and institution-specific needs are implemented wherever possible.
FeedBook
The FeedBook is a interactive web-based workbook for English classes at the German Gymnasium, developed by computational linguists at the University of Tübingen together with Diesterweg Verlag. The main goal of FeedBook is to develop a system that provides immediate, individualized feedback to English language learners working on a range of tasks. To provide this kind of scaffolding feedback, state-of-the-art compuational analyses of meaning and form are implemented and further developed.
Interact4school
In the project Interact4school, a team of researchers from the University of Tübingen and Leuphana University Lüneburg investigates a digital, interactive textbook that can be used in English lessons at school. The goal is to use individual feedback to provide learners with the best possible learning processes and thus contribute to a high level of learning success.
Jugend Präsentiert
Jugend Präsentiert is a project funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation and carried out throughout Germany in close cooperation with the organization Science in Dialogue (Wissenschaft im Dialog). The aim of the project is to promote students' presentation skills – with a particular focus on education in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Hence, our main focus is to strengthen rhetorical competence in science communication.
In the Media
DIE ZEIT: Nachhilfe vom Digitaltutor
Detmar Meurers explains in an interview with the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT how the tutoring system FeedBook can help students improve their English.