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Coordination Office

The Coordination Office for Multilingualism and Language Education (aka KoMBi) assisted the research cluster in the following areas:

  • Internal networking via the organisation of meetings and workshops on topics of mutual interest and the facilitation of exchange between the projects
  • External networking via cooperation with thematically relevant projects, both internationally and within Germany
  • Dissemination via publications and events aimed at different target audiences (research, practice, general public)
  • Nachwuchsförderung: Qualifizierung des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses
  • Emerging researcher support via specially tailored workshops and mentoring
  • Sustainable data management        
  • Development of the research field

KoMBi conducted several activities with respect to the coordinating responsibilities outlined above. Here is a selection:

Internal Networking

The following workshops were organised:

  • Working with Turkish language data (March 2015)
  •  Archiving and re-using qualitative research data (July 2015)
  • Transfer of research findings to educational practice (April 2016)
  • Intervention in educational research (September 2018)
  • Educational Linguistics (January 2020)

External Networking

  • Formal exchange with the German consortium BiSS ( = Bildung durch Sprache und Schrift / Education via Language and Writing)
  • Presenting the cluster projects and their findings at European and international conferences (e.g. European Conference of Educational Research (ECER), Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Focal Meeting of the World Education Research Association (WERA))
  • KoMBi conferences to publicise the projects and their findings to large audiences (February 2017, November 2020). Alongside project presentations, keynotes were delivered by Prof. Paul Leseman (Utrecht University), Prof. Nancy Hornberger (University of Pennsylvania), Prof. Erika Hoff (Florida Atlantic Univeristy), Prof. Rob Schoonen (Radboud University Nijmegen)
  • International symposium for researchers and practitioners around the world (December 2020)

Dissemination

  • Workshops for educational practitioners in North Rhine-Westphalia (September 2016) and the Saarland (December 2019)
  • Specially tailored workshop for educational policy and administration (November 2020) 
  • Overview brochure of the projects and their findings in German and in English
  • A blog dedicated to the summary of research findings in accessible ways (blog posts are in German and English)
  • A Facebook page with the latest happenings in the cluster, the coordination office and the general field of multilingualism and language education

Emerging Researcher Support

  • Conference organised together with emerging researchers for emerging researchers (June 2019). The two-day conference included keynote lectures, participant presentations, workshops, peer and expert feedback.
  • Annual 'autumn schools' on the following topics: 
    • Doing the Doctorate, The Nature of doctorateness
    • Making thinking visible through writing your thesis
    • Academic Writing in English
    • Presenting at academic conferences
    • Academic publishing
    • Data workshops on quantitative and qualitative methods
  • Webinars: 
    • Multilingual reciprocal reading (Dr. Christoph Gantefort)
    • Multilingualism and foreign-language acquisition (Prof. Holger Hopp)
    • Developing a learning community for plurilingual inclusion at a public school in Toronto (Prof. Heather Lotherington, York University, Canada)
    • Migration and Education (Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Barbara Herzog-Punzenberger)
    • Quality standards in qualitative research (Prof. Doren Prinz)
    • Action Research as a Tool of Affirmation and Integration of Pupils' Identity in Education (Dr. sc. Klara Bilić Meštrić)
    • Language experience changes executive functions: Evidence from multilingual and monolingual children (Prof. Gregory J. Poarch)
    • Publishing empirical educational research internationally (Prof. Jürgen Baumert, Prof. Ulrich Trautwein)
    • International webinar series organised together with the World Education Research Association (WERA) (Dr. Sarah McMonagle, Prof. Gregory J. Poarch)
  • The MultiTEd project (Multilingualism and Teacher Education) brought together emerging researchers from different national education contexts to discuss and document how pre-service teachers are prepared to deal with multilingualism in the classroom (2018).

Development of the Research Field

  • KoMBi conducted a Delphi survey on the most pressing research needs in the field of multilingualism and language education. You can read about the findings here
  • The Delphi survey was adapted and conducted in four other European countries (Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain). You can read the cross-national comparisons here.