Dr. Katharina von Elbwart
Current projects
Bagwell Paderborn Exchange
Interested in spending parts of your Praxissemester in an English-speaking country? How about the US? And how about teaching students at a top college in Georgia?
Starting in 2025, the Department of English and American Studies at Paderborn University and the Bagwell College of Education at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, US, will offer 6-week-stays for graduate students studying English (M.A. of Education only) who wish to do parts of their Praxissemester abroad. This is a great opportunity to teach at an American college and learn more about TESOL and teacher education in the US.
Open to all grade bands, i.e. LA GS/SP/HRSGe/Gy/Ge/BK. Keen to go? Contact katharina.elbwart@upb.de for more details!
Global Englishes Language Teaching
In Summer 2025, five German universities started a joint lecture series on “Global Englishes Language Teaching” (organized by Prof. Julia Reckermann & Dr. Ricardo Römhild at the University of Münster). There will be a new instalment in Summer 2026, watch this space. More information on our first series here.
Language Teacher Identity (LTI)
This is an ongoing qualitative research study on emerging LTIs which explores avenues of how teachers’ ideologies towards the use of language emerge in preservice academic contexts. Our research uses a mixed-methods approach and combines short narratives with an online attitude survey to be completed by respondents before and after a 15 week-long course in TESOL. As part of this project, one strand explores emerging and changing attitudes future teachers of English hold towards the use of English in class (before and after in-service training). This includes attitudes towards the use of English vs. other languages (heritage languages and/or German), but also towards the use of different (nonstandard) varieties of English in the context of Global Englishes and language teaching (2022 - today).
My colleague Dagmar Keatinge and I hosted an international symposium in November 2025. More information can be found on the conference website here.
From this resulted a research group on LTI. If you wish to be added, please contact katharina.elbwart@upb.de
Classroom Linguistics
The project, which was initiated together with Dr. Philipp Meer (Münster), investigates how the field of linguistics can contribute to an informed approach to teaching English as a second/foreign language. It thus explores topics positioned at the intersection of applied linguistics, educational linguistics and language education, for example teaching linguistics as a subject in school, corpus-based approaches to language teaching, or applying sociolinguistics to understand language variation in the classroom.
Part of this scope is an interest group for scholars working at the intersection of linguistics and applied linguistics/language education to
- connect (with) academics working in these disciplines,
- bring together like-minded scholars and practitioners,
- provide a platform for academic exchange and networking,
- make research (projects) visible
and have fun doing linguistics together.
More here