The standing of German in the Canton and City of Fribourg has been a topic of public debate for decades. Currently, French and German are official languages of the canton, and their use is anchored in the constitution; moreover, it is possible for communes “with a significant traditional linguistic minority” to use both French and German as official languages (art. 6 para. 3). Nevertheless, an implementation act specifying the criteria and legal procedures has not yet been drafted....

The purpose of this project is to study the ‟comprehension‟ aspect of oral interaction competence. More specifically, this involves studying the linguistic and cultural characteristics of comprehension in oral interactions as well as testing teaching sequences that target comprehension in oral interactions for an audience of advanced learners of French as a foreign language.

The aim of this research project is to highlight the emergence and development of the Esperantist discourse and movement in Switzerland, in connection with its characteristic sociopolitical and discursive conditions: neutrality and multilingualism. In addition, the project examines how the sociopolitical and discursive conditions specific to Switzerland contribute to the positioning of Swiss Esperantists within the global Esperanto movement.

This PhD project explored multimodal pictorial, musical and movement-based interventions that are intended to promote self-regulated learning processes. Scholarly findings increasingly indicate that scholastic success is not rooted solely in subject knowledge and general intelligence, but that scholastic achievement is also influenced by psychosocial factors with little known significance in learning (Kuhl, 2001).

The project deals with the linguistic diversity of German as a foreign language from a theoretical as well as practical point of view. The empirical study sheds light on the question of how GFL-beginners (CEFR level A2) deal with standard varieties of German in listening comprehension, and searches to identify potential correlating factors. The results are expected to provide theoretical and practical implications for German as a foreign language.

The aim of this project is to investigate the potential uses of research corpora in teaching. This long-term project is carried out in collaboration with other research groups in Switzerland and France, in particular in Lyon as part of the project CLAPI-FLE http://clapi.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/FLE/projet_clapi_fle.php.

Financed by Fond d’Innovation de la Faculté des lettres, University of Fribourg The aim of this project is to test the use of the digital collaborative writing tool FRAMAPAD https://framapad.org to support the note-taking skills of allophone students attending courses in the humanities.

This project aims to investigate how listeners grow accustomed to non-native varieties of their native language. While most extant research on adaptation to regional and non-native varieties focuses on pronunciation, our focus is on listeners’ adaptation to non-native morphosyntax. Specifically, we will investigate if and how listeners pick up on the fact that a morphosyntactic cue for interpreting sentences as Subject-Verb-Object or Object-Verb-Subject (viz., German case-marking) is...

The overarching goal of this project is to investigate how knowledge of a substandard variety of the first language (e.g., a local dialect) affects the learning of another language.

Swiss National Science Foundation, project funding, project no. 176338 The aim of the project is to examine the different ways in which French, German and Italian speakers achieve cohesion in narrative spoken discourse. Our approach is derived from theories and methods developed in research on information structure.