Our projects in the area of job-related language support aim to both promote the language and communication skills of vocational school students and trainees and to professionalise teaching staff. The projects demonstrate the impact and effectiveness of scenario-based language didactics as well as, in particular, the scenario-based integrated promotion of reading and writing skills. They also reveal options for language-sensitive specialist teaching and transdisciplinarity in job-specific language support.

Language and communication skills are evaluated for different purposes, for example for certification and assessment purposes or as a basis for support measures. Our language skills evaluation projects cover different target groups (e.g. first-year students, school pupils, adults), various test contexts (e.g. studying, migration/integration) and different test purposes (e.g. assessment, certification). We develop tools for the evaluation of language skills and train teachers in using them. In particular, we also look at issues relating to the development of digital language tests.

Language technologies, in particular artificial intelligence, are changing language teaching and learning as well as the research being conducted into these areas. Current issues relate to, for example, the development of self-learning programmes, options for automatic text correction and the development of digital literacy skills. We support teachers and learners in using language technologies in a reflective and targeted manner (primarily for the further development of reading and writing skills) and in doing so observe how skills shift and change. To this end, we develop resources (so-called corpora) for research and application purposes. Corpora can, for example, form the basis for the identification of acquisition challenges or for automatic text evaluation.