Germany has become a home for increasingly many new arrivals, especially in North Rhine-Westphalia, where about half speak German as a second language and another language at home. The main objective of the proposed research project is to identify heritage language education programmes in Germany, document the approaches they use, and determine if an evaluation literature exists. Research methods include surveys and focus group interviews with teachers of heritage language students in Germany. The project will germinate thinking about programme options for heritage language speakers in Germany, and help build lasting US-German collaborations engaged in language education policy analysis.
Prof. Jeff MacSwan
University of Maryland (USA) | Applied Linguistics and Language Education; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science
E-mail: jeff.macswan@college-uaruhr.de
Jeff MacSwan is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education at the University of Maryland. He is also Professor of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, and affiliate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Maryland Language Science Center. MacSwan’s research programme focuses on the linguistic study of bilingualism, codeswitching (or language alternation) and translanguaging theory, and implications for theories about the role of language in the education of multilingual students.
MacSwan is the editor of the International Multilingual Research Journal and serves on several editorial boards. Examples of his work appear in American Educational Research Journal, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Lingua, Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, Teachers College Record, and in edited collections and handbooks.
Jeff MacSwan is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and of the National Education Policy Center. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Bilingual Education Research Special Interest Group (SIG) and the Leadership through Scholarship Award from the AERA Second Language Research SIG, both in 2021.
His recent books include Multilingual Perspectives on Translanguaging (Multilingual Matters, 2022) and Codeswitching in the Classroom: Critical Perspectives on Teaching, Learning, Policy, and Ideology (with Christian J. Faltis, Routledge, 2020).
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Prof. Katja F. Cantone & Prof. Tobias Schroedler
University of Duisburg-Essen | Multilingualism, German as Second Language, Social Inclusion
E-mail: katja.cantone@uni-due.de
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© Frank Preuss
Prof. Katja F. Cantone
University of Duisburg-Essen | Multilingualism and German as Second Language
E-mail: katja.cantone@uni-due.de
Katja F. Cantone is Professor for Multilingualism and German as Second Language at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She is the author of Code-Switching in bilingual children (2007) and co-author of a book on language maintenance of heritage languages in Germany (2024). As a linguist, she has worked on language acquisition in bilingual children for many years, analysing how children acquire the linguistic systems and investigating aspects such as code-switching and language balance. Currently, she focuses on language policy and educational aspects of multilingualism and language maintenance. Together with Heike Roll and Tobias Schroedler, she is editor of Sprachliche Teilhabe in mehrsprachigen Kontexten, a book series dedicated to language participation in social, institutional, and individual contexts. Since 2023, she has been director of the new university programme for elementary teachers ‘Deutsch für Schülerinnen und Schüler mit Zuwanderungsgeschichte’ (German for second language learners / heritage language teaching) and is currently investigating how plurilingual orientations can be developed in teacher training.
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Prof. Tobias Schroedler
University of Duisburg-Essen | Multilingualism and Social Inclusion
Dr Tobias Schroedler is Junior Professor of Multilingualism and Social Inclusion at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He holds an MPhil (2011) and PhD (2016) in Applied Linguistics from Trinity College Dublin. Before his current role, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg and has been visiting scholar at Macquarie University Sydney (Australia) and the universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria (South Africa). His research addresses multilingualism in education, multilingual pedagogies, institutional multilingualism, language use on the labour market, and language ideologies, including the prestige and value assigned to languages. He currently leads four funded research projects on international comparisons of heritage languages in education, on using multilingual repertoires in the workplace, and on teacher professionalisation for multilingual learning contexts. Tobias Schroedler has presented papers at over 50 international conferences; he has authored several books as well as over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
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