Our overview of current dissertation work at German universities has identified four main strands of research interest within the field of second language acquisition (SLA). The 38 Ph.D. theses reviewed here were all read between 2006 and 2009 and fall into the subject areas of: foreign language (FL) teaching in primary school, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and multilingual pedagogy, language learner autonomy, and multimedia and language learning. Research methods are mostly qualitative in nature, although method and instrument triangulation are common, and studies often involve smaller research groups. The focus of study tends to be quite practical, reflecting the need to adapt teaching curriculums and learning materials to changing learning situations and populations.
This paper reviews a purposive sample of 23 doctoral dissertations in second language (L2) education, completed between 2009 and 2013 and published in Germany. From amongst all (approx. 70) relevant dissertations from this period, the following three broad thematic strands can be identified, for which a selection of exemplary dissertations was chosen to review: (1) Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL); (2) learning and teaching about culture in the language classroom; and (3) language teacher education. Categorization of themes was guided by a bottom-up approach, clustering thematically (rather than methodologically) similar works. We identify relevant topics and link these with trends in research methodology (qualitative/quantitative/mixed-methods). We also discuss the depth and breadth of these dissertations and situate their scholarly contributions within German and international research on language education.
Amid the many published pages of excited hyperbole regarding the potential of the Internet for human communications, one salient feature of current Internet communication technologies is frequently overlooked: the reality that Internet- and computer-mediated communications, to date, are communicative environments constructed through language (mostly text). In cyberspace, written language therefore mediates the human-computer interface as well as the human-human interface. What are the implications of the domination of Internet and computer-mediated communications by text? Researchers from diverse disciplines—from distance educators to linguists to social scientists to postmodern philosophers—have begun to investigate this question. They ask: Who speaks online, and how? Is online language really text, or is it “speech”? How does culture affect the language of cyberspace? Approaching these questions from their own disciplinary perspectives, they variously position cyberlanguage as “text,” as “semiotic system,” as “socio-cultural discourse” or even as the medium of cultural hegemony (domination of one culture over another). These different perspectives necessarily shape their analytical and methodological approaches to investigating cyberlanguage, underlying decisions to examine, for example, the details of online text, the social contexts of cyberlanguage, and/or the social and cultural implications of English as Internet lingua franca. Not surprisingly, investigations of Internet communications cut across a number of pre-existing scholarly debates: on the nature and study of “discourse,” on the relationships between language, technology and culture, on the meaning and significance of literacy, and on the liter
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