Mission Statement

English Language and Linguistics at Chemnitz tries to combine research and teaching, and theory and practise. We specialise in applied approaches, focusing on computers and cultures, i.e. modern research tools for analysing and learning English in a world-wide perspective.

In research, we are particularly interested in cognitive and sociolinguistic questions that we can answer empirically on the basis of large text collections (called corpora). In teaching, we encourage students to pursue their own research projects using similar methodologies to analyse, for instance, academic writing on every level or culture-specific WWW pages. Thus, our students gain access to a modern world of professional international language services.

We are proud to have a world-wide network of collaborators and send students out to our ERASMUS partners from Glasgow to Istanbul and from Porto to Tampere or to our project partners from Cameroon to China. We also welcome international guests who share our linguistic specialisations and support them through scholarships and joint projects wherever possible. We have supervised over a dozen PhD theses and have had internationally funded research projects with partners in Britain, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Puerto Rico and others in Africa and Asia and look forward to many more.

Our teaching philosophy

Our teaching philosophy is based on intensive hands-on instruction in small groups. We offer innovative new courses that emphasize among other topics new media, the language-and-culture interface and cognitive as well as formal language processing.

The topics of our courses are closely tied up with our research interests at the REAL Centre. Current research focuses on

• Specific vs. popular academic English
• English as a world language, especially in Africa and East Asia
• Learner Behaviour on the Internet
• Contrastive linguistics
• Localisation in Globalisation: English as an International lingua franca in Business, Politics, and Culture

Other major research projects at the REAL Centre include the development of tools for the English-German translation corpus and for the corpus of East African English as well as other NLP applications.