News

We are happy to announce that the workshop "Language as a social practice: Constructing (a)symmetries in legal discourse" will be held on 7-8 September 2023, at the Department of English, American Celtic Studies, Rabinstr. 8, 53113 Bonn. The workshop will bring together scholars with a background in linguistics and law. It seeks to showcase a diverse perspective on language, law and society, and explore the way forward of the interdisciplinary study of legal discourse at Bonn and beyond.

We are thrilled to extend a warm and enthusiastic welcome to you as a new member of our Applied Linguistics degree program here at the University of Bonn. Your journey to academic excellence and personal growth begins here, and we are excited to have you on board! To kickstart your journey and help you connect with fellow students and faculty, we have organized a special welcome event on Monday, October 9th at 12 pm. This event is designed for you to meet your peers, ask questions, and learn about our campus and discover Bonn with us in a little city tour. A relaxed lunch at 2 pm is the perfect opportunity to meet not only your fellow Master's degree students but also students from higher years who can share their experiences and insights with you. If you have any questions until then, contact us mentors at mentor-appliedlinguistics[at]uni-bonn.de

We organize an annual Forum Beruf event, where alumni of the M.A. Applied Linguistics program share their experiences with entering the job market, finding internships, and more. More information on the event and attending alumni will follow soon.

We would like to invite you to the guest lecture held by Dr. Inke Du Bois (University of Bremen) titled "Age and gender related linguistic differences of digital humor" on Wednesday February 7th from 6 - 8pm (c.t.), in seminar room 8, Rabinstraße 8.

Each term, we organise a Research Day for the PhD students and post-doctoral students at BAEL. The purpose of this meeting is for everyone to present their ongoing work, regardless of the stage they are at in their research projects. The setting is less formal than at a conference and offers an opportunity for in-depth discussions of the individual projects.

We would like to invite you to the Thirteenth annual Bonn Applied English Linguistics Conference under the theme "Studying World Englishes — Teaching World Englishes". Our two keynote lectures this year are given by Prof. Dr. Michael Westphal (World Englishes in English Language Teaching: Analyzing Barriers of Innovation) and Dr. Guyanne Wilson (On gatekeeping: Language ideologies in real and imagined classroom spaces). All are welcome!

Get a chance to hear from students about their experiences, learn more about the requirements of the study program, and ask any questions you have. Get engaged in our Q&A sessions!

Learn more about how to sign up for courses and about university life in Bonn. Get to know your lecturers and fellow students!

The Alumni Network invites you to Career Forum Applied Linguistics, students ask questions and alumni answer!

We would like to invite you to the Fourteenth Annual Bonn Applied English Linguistics Conference under the theme "Corpus Approaches to Linguistics". Our two keynote lectures this year are given by Prof. Dr. Valentin Werner (All Fun and Games? Corpus Approaches to Pop Cultural Linguistics) and Dr. Isobelle Clarke (Co-occurrence is key: Trolls, Trump, Tyranny, and the Taliban). All are welcome!

The university workplace is representative of international-ised/-ising workplaces in general, where different communities, languages, and cultures coexist. Staff encounter their colleagues’ and students’ accents – of Italian, of English, and in my case, French - and sometimes the result is that communication can be quite hard work. Even with the best intentions, sometimes we just cannot understand a speaker. However, when we think about spoken interactions, we have to accept that it is not just about how the speaker produces a language; the actions and skills of listeners should also be addressed. This flip or change of perspective begs two questions: can we, as listeners, learn to cope better with spoken variation? And if so, how? To access this and next events, you should create an account on the H2IOSC Training Environment. Choose the course “Language and Accent Discrimination - Online Seminar Series”, activate code : PbK837GtE. Make sure to have the Teams platform installed.

In spaces informed and characterised by Anglo-Western ideologies and discourses, migrants are exposed to overlapping forms of marginalisation where cultural and linguistic stereotypes coincide and blend with ethnic, racial, and gender stereotypes. In this presentation, I discuss how intersectionality is reflected in different forms of social stereotypes which attempt to subordinate, inferiorise, and judge translingual migrants in Australia. This discussion serves the purpose of uncovering underlying systemic and social disparities in Australia, as they are (in)advertently perpetuated and invigorated by a more dominant counterpart. To access this and next events, you should create an account on the H2IOSC Training Environment. Choose the course “Language and Accent Discrimination - Online Seminar Series”, activate code : PbK837GtE. Make sure to have the Teams platform installed.

Accent discrimination remains one of the most pervasive forms of linguistic bias, influencing social perceptions, identity construction, and attitudes towards language variation. This talk examines how accents shape linguistic hierarchies and social interactions, drawing on three research projects that employ distinct methodologies. To access this and next events, you should create an account on the H2IOSC Training Environment. Choose the course “Language and Accent Discrimination — Online Seminar Series”, activate code : PbK837GtE. Make sure to have the Teams platform installed.

This talk explores how to counteract language ideologies that damage speakers' subjectivities and prevent their equal participation in society. To this end, it analyzes the impact (i) of a participatory action research project for sociolinguistic justice and (ii) of critical pedagogies (among students, focusing on the analysis of life trajectories linked to biographies and linguistic repertoires; and among future teachers, focusing on the integration of language ideologies in the training curriculum). To access this and next events, you should create an account on the H2IOSC Training Environment. Choose the course “Language and Accent Discrimination - Online Seminar Series”, activate code : PbK837GtE. Make sure to have the Teams platform installed.

In cooperation with the Erasmus+ project 'CIRCE - Counteracting Accent Discrimination Practices in Education' Building on a previous analysis of how World Englishes are represented in the English curricula across all German federal states (Meer 2021), this talk explores whether and how curricular expectations are reflected in current English language textbooks used in German secondary schools. While the applied linguistics literature increasingly advocates for World Englishes-informed teaching (Matsuda & Matsuda 2018), and some German curricula have begun to acknowledge the global diversity of English, the extent to which such perspectives shape classroom materials deserves further scrutiny. Drawing on research within the CIRCE project, this talk examines a selection of widely used secondary-level English textbooks in Germany. The study explores which varieties of English are included, how linguistic diversity is portrayed, and to what extent textbooks align with curricular aims.

This talk will provide an overview of the architecture that underpins modern AI language models including n-gram language models, word embedding models, and modern transformer models. These models will be examined for alignment with theories of human language processing. The talk will also focus on how AI models recreate classical language processing pipelines associated with computational linguistics and language processing.

This talk and its subsequent workshop will explore lexical properties in the English language and methods to automatically calculate lexical features. The follow-up workshop will focus on introducing natural language processing tools for lexical studies and how they can be used to assess language learner data in a large corpus collected in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting. Data analysis techniques and hands-on data exploration will provide practical applications using learner corpora.

This talk and its subsequent workshop will introduce approaches to measuring syntactic properties in the English language, with a specific focus on large- and fine-grained syntactic measures. Approaches to measure syntax automatically through part-of-speech (POS) taggers and dependency parsers will be covered. The follow-up workshop will focus on how POS taggers and dependency parses can be used to assess language learner data at the large- and fine-grained levels in a large corpus focusing on English as a Second Language (EFL) learners. Data analysis techniques and hands-on data exploration will provide practical applications using learner corpora.

In this talk, I will introduce a framework for coding speaker stance (i.e., the way individuals position themselves towards an interaction) that I developed with colleagues from the University of Toronto. Our framework, which combines insights from variationist sociolinguistics and pragmatics, is based on pragmatic tests that offer a replicable way of capturing an interactional phenomenon such as stance quantitatively. Drawing on two case studies of complementizer (that) – i.e., the variation between overt that and zero in sentences such as I think (that) linguistic variation is fun – I discuss challenges and opportunities of using this framework, as well as its implications for the study of language and social meaning.