Emeritus English Language and Linguistics

Office hours: send me an email, I invite you into the BBB room.

Curriculum vitae

He is Emeritus concentrating on his research projects (below) and international teaching on Academic Writing & Publishing, Digital Research Methodologies and Digital Innovation in Language Teaching. He taught at Chemnitz from April 1993 to March 2021. He studied mainly English and Geography at Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany) and the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC, England). He taught at the Universities at Bamberg (PhD 1985), Bayreuth (Habilitation 1991) and Dresden before coming to Chemnitz to set up a new department here in April 1993. He likes to work with international students, also in Summer Schools and as Guest Professor in Guangzhou/China (DAAD) in 2015 and 2024 and in Modena/Italy in 2019, 2022 and 2024, for example. SM

short CV

official CV

Current Projects

SFB/CPC Hybrid Societies: TP CLaVa Erasmus+: TEFL-ePal Global comparison How to adapt FLLonlineCorona

Regionalising the Oxford English Dictionary with my East Africa discussion group

DAAD: Dialogue SEE: SEE2013, SEE2014, SEE2017(DICE), SEE2018(CHEP), SEE2019(Conflicting Truths), SEE2020(UnConTrust),SEE2021(CoConTrustO)

Chemnitz Africa/Asia Symposium on English: CASE, Brno-Chemnitz PhD Colloquium (Ostpartnerschaften)

Alexander-von-Humboldt Marathon 2023: Postgrad symposium tour to 5 partner universities in 3 countries: Brno (CR), Klagenfurth (AU), Padova, Ferrara and Modena (I)

Research Interests

His main research interests are in Language & Culture (sociolinguistics, English in Africa and SE Asia), Language & Computers (corpus-linguistics, Internet English), and Language & Cognition (e-learning, Academic Writing).
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8499-3158

Over 50 years of the Internet (BBC), 30 years of the www (BBC), 20 years of Wikipedia (Aljazeera)

Editorial Work

Academic Output

Research

REAL = Research in English & Applied Linguistics

Investigating real language - Promoting intercultural communication

The real philosophy

Academic English:

SPACE Corpus
ChemCorpus
Complexity
Wiki+
TechPresent

Language Learning & Computers

Chemnitz Internet Grammar

The English-German translation corpus

The REAL Centre

Student Computing Projects / MA theses / PhD theses

The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (Click here to download)

English in Saxony, and a new concept of language services

Current research projects

The East African component of the International Corpus of English is freely available from the ICE www site.

REAL Studies (Research in English and Applied Linguistics)

Mission Statement

This series demonstrates the collaboration the specialists in Research in English and Applied Linguistics at Chemnitz, the REAL Centre, with international project partners on current issues in research and teaching.

Publications include:

REAL Studies 17 (2019):
Conflicting Truths in Academic and Journalistic Writing

REAL Studies 16 (2019):
Critical Discourse and Corpus Approaches to Systemic Functional Grammar

REAL Studies 15 (2018):
Academic Writing for Africa: The Journal Article

REAL Studies 14 (2018):
Credibility, Honesty, Ethics, and Politeness in Academic and Journalistic Writing

REAL Studies 13 (2017):
From the Virtual Sphere to Physical Space: Exploring Language Use in Nigerian Democracy

REAL Studies 12 (2017):
Working with Media Texts: Deconstructing and Constructing Crises in Europe.

REAL Studies 11 (2019):
African Youth Languages: The Rural - Urban Divide

REAL Studies 10 (2016):
Academic Writing Across Disciplines in Africa: From Students to Experts

REAL Studies 9 (2015):
Essays on Language in Societal Transformation: a festschrift in honour of Segun Awonusi

REAL Studies 8 (2015):
Graduate Academic Writing in South Eastern Europe: Practical and Theoretical Perspectives

REAL Studies 7 (2013):
English for Academic Purposes: Practical and Theoretical Approaches

REAL Studies 6 (2011):
Exploring Academic Writing in Cameroon English: A Corpus-based Perspective

REAL Studies 5 (2011):
Academic Writing in Europe: Empirical Perspectives

REAL Studies 4 (2007):
English Projects in Teaching and Research in Central Europe: Proceedings of the Freiberg Conference,May 04-06, 2007

REAL Studies 3 (2007):
Complexity and Coherence: Approaches to Linguistic Research and Language Teaching

REAL Studies 2 (2006):
Stress Pattern of Nigerian English - An Empirical Phonology Approach

REAL Studies 1 (2005):
English for Central Europe - Interdisciplinary Saxon-Czech Perspectives

Series Advisors

Marina Bondi
Gabriela Missikova
Renata Povolna Andrew Tollet
Andrew Wilson

Publisher

<Göttingen: Cuvillier

Recent ELL Projects

Sonderforschungsbereich "Hybrid Societies"

D03 CLaVa (Credibility & Language Varieties: Acceptance of embodied conversational pedagogical agents in hybrid societies)

Volkswagen Stiftung

Academic Writing for Africa 2018 Benin

DAAD - Dialogue with South Eastern Europe:

Academic Writing for South Eastern Europe 2013, 2014
News for South Eastern Europe (DAAD, see above) 2017 (DICE), 2018 (CHEP), 2019 (Conflicting Truths)

Erasmus+

Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Palestinian HEIs (TEFL-ePal)

Older Research Projects

InternetGrammar 2000-04, Tech Present 2002, Language Learning & Computers 2004

China Experience 2010, 2015

English in Saxony 2002: A new concept of Language Services

SILCC Summer Schools:
SILCC2010 , SILCC2011, SILCC2012

Stance and Interaction in Novice Academic English: German-Czech university students compared (SINAE)(DAAD, 2010/11)

The common project goal of the Czech and German project partners is the systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis of linguistic features in non-native novice writers’ academic English. The project will concentrate on the following linguistic expressions:

stance markers, i.e. lexico-grammatical expressions that express the writer’s attitude towards the proposition in the text
hedges, i.e. linguistic devices that convey a lack of knowledge or confidence
features of intertextuality, such as strategies of referencing and citation
adaptation and simplification markers, including semantic scaling and back-scaling of specific items in ontologies of different academic domains
features of writer-reader interaction, such as the use of personal pronouns and the imperative that show authorial presence and establish a special discourse relation

After the milestones "databases" and "concept categories" are established, the data will be compared with findings of recent studies on native academic discourse as well as with the results of the Czech group in order to discover general features of non-nativeness for novices as well as special German and Czech features in national, i.e. culture-specific academic writing style.

"Comparing and conceptualising complexity and coherence in English texts and teaching (Co4ET2)" (2004-2006, DAAD)

This project comprises several interrelated aspects of computer-assisted analysis and teaching that are pursued as the major project in both departments. Comparative means here interlanguage (German or Czech versus English) as well as intralanguage (e.g. English spoken versus written, academic versus popular).
Conceptualising refers to the academic endeavour to define and test the key concepts of complexity and coherence as well as the learners’ psycholinguistic attempts to come to terms with key concepts of English grammar.
Complexity refers to syntactic as well as semantic as well as textual multi-layered overlapping concepts and linguistic features.
Individual subprojects will approach these intersecting issues from different perspectives. The broad discussion will enhance the current discussion about texts as linguistic objects in terms of methodology (corpus research, introspection, questionnaires) and in terms of content processing (syntactic and lexical constraints that become obvious in translation, conceptual problems of individual learners and creators of particular text genres).

"Lernerverhalten in der InternetGrammar" (1998-2002; DFG)

Dieses Projekt versucht, die Leitlinien der modernen interaktiven Sprachlernprogramme auf das Internet zu übertragen und tatsächliches Nutzerverhalten am Beispiel eines Grammatikprogramms zu untersuchen. Die Untersuchungsgruppe umfasst fortgeschrittene Lerner des Englischen, d.h. Studenten, Lehrer und Wissenschaftler. Die zahlreichen Auswahlmöglichkeiten (Erläuterungen, Beispiele oder Übungen) lassen den Lerner selbst entscheiden, welche Form des Sprachlernens er zu welchem Zeitpunkt für die interessanteste ansieht. Im Internet lassen sich alle Bewegungen der Sprachlerner aufzeichnen und so lernerspezifische Präferenzen feststellen. Als Ergebnis soll ein lernerspezifisches (ausbaubares) Grammatikprogramm im Internet zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Dies ist nicht nur ein Forschungsinstrument sondern auch eine Serviceleistung für sächsische Schulen und Studierende der TU Chemnitz.

"TechPresent: Ein virtuelles Lern- und Überprüfungsmodul für wissenschaftliche, technische Texte in Englisch" (2001-2002, BMBF/Bildungsportal Sachsen)

Ziel des Projekts ist ein internetbasiertes, auf die Bedürfnisse von deutschen Studierenden und Wissenschaftlern ausgerichtetes Lernmodul zur adressaten-, medien- und funktionsgerechten Präsentation von fachsprachlichen Texten in Englisch. Dazu werden in einem Webportal Modelltexte kommentiert, computerbasierte Überprüfungsmöglichkeiten demonstriert, Terminologiedatenbanken vorgestellt, Übungen programmiert und Hintergrundinformationen zusammengestellt.

"Localisation in globalisation" (2001-; DAAD et al.)

Dieses Projekt vergleicht, wie die Weltsprache Englisch verschiedenen kulturellen Kontexten angepasst wird. Es belegt, wie nationale Identität(en), z.B. in Ostafrika oder Südostasien, kulturelle Merkmale und Werte in der internationalen Sprache Englisch im Internet, in Filmen oder in der Werbung dargestellt werden.

Further Projects

ChemCorpus

Reference: Schmied, Josef/Dheskali, Vincenzo (fc). Manual to accompany the Chemnitz Corpus of Academic Writing (ChemCorpus). Chemnitz. pdf

Please, contact Prof Schmied if you want to gain access to the ChemCorpus

SPACE Corpus

Please, contact Prof Schmied if you want to gain access to Space Corpus.