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Humboldt Research Grant for Development of a Language Test

Press Release No. 49/2010
11 March 2010
Dr. Frenette Southwood visiting scholar at Department of German Language and Literature at Universität Heidelberg
Dr. Frenette Southwood
Dr. Frenette Southwood

South African linguist Dr. Frenette Southwood conducts research on the measurement of linguistic performance and language acquisition. Her work focuses on the development of procedures for language assessment that take into account the distinct nature of multi-language socialisation in South Africa. Thanks to a Georg Forster Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, she will be a visiting scholar at Heidelberg University until August 2010, working together with Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Felder and Dr. Katharina Bremer of the Department of German Language and Literature.

Frenette Southwood studied language therapy, audiology and general linguistics at Stellenbosch University (South Africa), later earning her doctorate from the Radboud University of Nijmegen with a dissertation on language disorders in Afrikaans. She is currently working on the development of a dialect-neutral and culturally independent language test for use on English- and Afrikaans-speaking children between four and nine years of age from socially disadvantaged families. During her research sojourn, Dr. Southwood will be collaborating with various scholars from the university and its School of Education to draw on their psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic expertise on linguistic aspects of migration research for her own studies.

The Humboldt Foundation awards Georg Forster Research Fellowships to highly qualified scientists from developing and threshold countries. The awards enable recipients to conduct a long-term research project with an academic host of their choice at a research institution in Germany.

 

Contact
Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Felder
Department of German Language and Literature
phone: +49 6221 54-3239
felder@gs.uni-heidelberg.de

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