Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Arts and Humanities II - Department of English and American Studies

Please note: Anne Mihan is on family leave. Katrin Schultze assumes the office hours for student counseling of the Master of Education program until October 2013. Please send an email to Mrs. Schultze in order to make an appointment: katrin.schultze@hu-berlin.de

According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of this university, the acquisition of a foreign language may be seen as one of the cornerstones of Bildung.

Starting from this perspective, we believe that the learning or teaching of English – no matter whether English is regarded as a ‘cultural’ or ‘global’ language (lingua franca) – has a transforming influence on one’s self-perception and attitude towards the world: learning a language actually ‘does’ something to learners, but learners also do something for themselves with the language. In our research project in the Foreign Language Education section, we investigate the significance of English for the individual learner, we ask about contexts in which English is learnt, and we study the effects present-day teaching models such as task-based or content-based approaches have on social, intercultural and aesthetic-literary learning processes in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms.

Last but not least, we place special emphasis on researching Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).