My Research Projects
ReDICo: Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively
2020-2024
The group’s work centers upon the research and analysis of intercultural practices and discourses within digital spaces and investigates diverse topics such as intercultural competence in internet settings, digital Europeanism, and online neo-nationalisms.
My ReDICo sub-project focused on intercultural games. I was interested in practices that foster learning and inclusion in this kind of intercultural intervention. Check out my latest publications on this website.
Multilingualism and multimodality
2019-2020
In connection to the project “Intercultural Communication in Interaction: multimodal approaches” (headed by Ulrike Schröder and funded by the WUN foundation), my colleague Adriana Barbosa Fernandes and I conducted a study on how in-service and pre-service teachers position themselves in relation to their foreign-language teaching and learning experiences and how they negotiate their identities as (future) teachers in a focus-group discussion. Our analysis, based on positioning theory and gesture studies, revealed a certain tension between current trends and more traditional discourses in the field of English teaching. The link to the pre-print can be found on this website.
Babbel study: Learners’ perceptions of a virtual-classroom system
2019-2020
In 2019 I engaged in a collaboration with the language learning company Babbel. After months of conversation aiming at getting a deep understanding of their products and didactic strategies, I proposed a study on their virtual-classroom solution to business professionals "Babbel Intensive." The project was very fulfilling in a number of ways. For example, I was able to involve students from the University of Potsdam in the project who participated in data collection and analysis. Moreover, these students and I profited from close interaction with Babbel which taught us the benefits of combining the theoretical knowledge acquired at the university with the development of user-centered language-learning solutions. The results of this project were published in the Computer Assisted Language Learning journal.
Business negotiations between Brazilians and Germans: conceptualization and practice (PhD project)
2014-2018
In my PhD, I investigated conceptualizations of ‘business negotiations’, i.e., the meaning of this term and the attached associations people make when they conceive of it. More specifically, I did an in-depth investigation of how the Brazilian and German business people I interviewed defined “success, conflict, and respect” in business negotiations. My analysis comprised different types of cognitive associations described in the fields of cognitive and cultural linguistics - metaphors, metonymies, image schemas as well as the cognitive-semantic processes of windowing of attention, fictive motion, and force dynamics (as described by Leonard Talmy). Through these fine-grained semantic and cultural-linguistic analyses of interview excerpts, I identified group-level conceptualizations chosen by the Brazilian and German groups of interviewees.
Specific results can be found in my monograph (link below) and the following articles and chapters (see my publications on this website):