Deutsch als Zweitsprache - Theorie und Didaktik des Zweitspracherwerbs                                

Since 2006, I have held the newly established professorship for German as a Second Language/Theory and Didactics of Second Language Acquisition at the Faculty of Modern Philologies. Previously, I was a professor of linguistics and language didactics at the Karlsruhe University of Education, where, among other things, I helped to establish a major in language support.

My main focus is the study of children's language acquisition. I am particularly interested in acquisition processes at the interface of syntax and semantics and in interdependencies between linguistic and cognitive development, as well as in ways of diagnosing and promoting children's language competence. Using a variety of experimental methods, I address the question of the universality and robustness of language acquisition paths by comparing different languages and acquisition types. To this end, I have studied early second language acquisition, developmental language disorders, and lately child heritage language.