Humanities

German Studies is the largest of the faculty’s departments, both in terms of professor and student numbers. Research centres on classroom teaching and educational research, language and literature in and with electronic media, social and cultural analysis, medieval studies and film studies.
The main research activities include:
“Normierung der länderübergreifendenBildungsstandards im Fach Deutsch für die Grundschule und die Sekundarstufe I” [Standardisation of Nationwide Educational Norms for German at Elementary School and Secondary School Level] commissioned by the Institut zur Qualitätsentwicklung im Bildungswesen in Berlin (Prof. Albert Bremerich-Vos), continued work on “LINSE”, the best-known German-language linguistics server on the internet (Prof. Ulrich Schmitz), “Evaluation der Ergebnisse zentraler Prüfungen 2008 im Fach Deutsch” [Evaluation of the 2008 Central Examination Scores in the Subject of German], a project sponsored by the Ministry for Schools and Further Education in NRW (Prof. Clemens Kammler) and “Die Rumäniendeutschen – eine Diskursanalyse. Entstehung, Entwicklung und Verwendung eines Begriffs” [The Romania-Germans – a Discourse Analysis: Origination, Development, and Usage of a Terminology], sponsored by the Federal Commissioner for Media and Culture; 2007 / 2008 (Prof. Petra Josting).
In March 2008, the 33rd International LAUD Symposium, “Cognitive Approaches to Second /  Foreign Language Processing: Theory and Pedagogy”, was held in Landau; the LAUD office in Essen (Prof. Ulrich Schmitz) is responsible for the conference transcript of this biennial symposium.