On Monday May 19, we officially welcomed Paula Winke from Michigan State University to our department as LFUI Guest Professor. Paula has been working in Innsbruck with LTRGI as a visiting scholar since September 2024, but has now started her two-month tenure as LFUI Guest Professor.
To mark this, she gave a well-attended talk on the potential of self-assessments for language learning and teaching as part of our department’s “Didaktik am Abend (DiA)” guest lecture series. In her presentation, she highlighted the value of “can-do statements” in language assessment, especially when adapted to specific cultural and learner backgrounds.
We are honored to host Paula at our team at the Department of Subject-Specific Education at the University of Innsbruck. A leading expert in the research and design of language tests, her valuable knowledge, experience, and vision is helping to advance the field of language assessment as a whole and has been very beneficial for our group’s work already. We particularly appreciated Paula’s insightful contributions as a trainer at the EALTA Winter School we hosted in December 2024, where she led inspiring sessions on task-based language teaching and assessment.
During her stay with our team, Paula has been working on an Open Access book on language testing aimed at supporting teachers and teacher trainers worldwide. She is also advising students on their dissertations, and will shortly launch an Open-Access book series on “Syllabi in Applied Linguistics” together with Benjamin Kremmel, with the first book in the series to be focused on syllabi in language testing. The series will extend the cooperation between LTRGI and Michigan State University far out into the future.
You can read Paula’s LFUI Guest Professor interview here.