Research Interests
- Visual Literacy
- Pictures and images are omnipresent in our daily life, and in order to be able to participate in multimodal cultural communication and discourse, individuals have to be able to ‘read’ and understand images – just like other texts and symbolic manifestations.
- Multilingualism
- The pedagogical concept of multilingualism responds to the rise of multilingualism in multicultural societies as a result of migration and globalization. Although there is a general consensus that a pedagogy of multilingual education needs to be developed, a comprehensive theoretical framework and practical proposals for the multilingual foreign language classroom are still desiderata.
- Culture Studies-Oriented Pedagogy of Teaching Foreign Languages
- The study of culture can provide profound insight into the language learners' lifeworld and can therefore be regarded as an epistemological framework of teaching and learning languages.
- Contextualization: Literature and Cultural History in the FL Classroom
- In the FL classroom, literary texts are often treated as self-contained semantic units. Contextualization can therefore be regarded as one of the major challenges of teaching literature.
- Theories of Textuality, Intertextuality and Discourse
- The prevalent concepts of textuality and intertextuality have undergone major changes in literary and in textual theories. Intertextuality can be regarded as one of the key concepts in literary studies, in discourse theories, and, since it is text-based and discursive, in the FL classroom.
- Literature and Cognition
- Although there is wide consensus about reader-orientation as a general principle in the literature classroom and, in literary studies, about the vital role of the reader, there is still a lot of research to be done to provide more insight in the cognitive processes that are involved in reading literary texts.
- Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
- The need to educate plurilingual citizens has led to consolidated models of integrated content and language learning.
- Pedagogical Competencies for Schools and Academic Classrooms
- 'Competency' as a paradigm in secondary and in tertiary education and training: The professionalization of teaching in school and in academic contexts requires valid descriptions of the competencies that are required.
- Holocaust Childhoods
- A rich literary field and a multilingual discourse has yet to be discovered as a culturally and pedagogically most relevant topic and research area.
- Electronic Media in the FL Classroom
- Digitalization and electronic media have had a major impact on concepts of the text, on teacher and learner roles, and even on literary and cultural canons. It is therefore one of the crucial fields of future development in the field of teaching foreign languages.