Working Group Lead
WG 4 - Heritage languages

Prof. Dr. Grit Mehlhorn

I am Professor of Didactics of Slavic Languages at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Leipzig, where I train future school teachers for Russian, Polish and Czech. Prior to teaching in Leipzig, I worked in the field of didactics of German as a foreign language. I am interested in how languages – particularly heritage languages – can be acquired and taught, when exposure to these languages is limited. Together with my colleague Prof. Bernhard Brehmer, I did a longitudinal study with teenage heritage language speakers of Polish and Russian that provided us with a lot of information on how heritage languages are acquired within families but also in a school environment.

I am interested in: Pronunciation acquisition, language learning strategies and multilingual didactics.

Dipl.-Übers. Barbara Stolarczyk

I am a lecturer for Polish and German as a foreign language and head the Heritage Languages Centre. In my free time, I enjoy playing volleyball in my women’s team and hiking, preferably in the beautiful Palatinate Forest.

My languages: Polish, German, Dutch, Slavic languages (receptive)

I am interested in: Heritage languages at universities, linguistic mediation and open forms of teaching/learning, especially in project work.