Mat(hias) SchulzeAssociate Professor of German Director of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Department
of Germanic and Slavic Studies Waterloo / Ontario N2L 3G1
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e-mail:
mschulze ä uwaterloo.ca Modern Languages Building
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Pen PictureI was born in Finsterwalde one early morning in the last century, stayed home with my mum, went to school, left town, got a degree as Diplomlehrer of German and Russian from a teacher training college which was incorporated soon after I left and is now part of Leipzig University. Talking about incorporation, I left east Germany after that was incorporated, too, and went to England and worked (part-time) as Lecturer in German at what became Sunderland University while I was there. Then I spent three years lecturing German and Linguistics at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Between 1995 and 2001, I was a Lecturer in German Linguistics and CALL in the Centre for Computational Linguistics at UMIST in Manchester where I also obtained my PhD in Language Engineering (German Linguistics and Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL)). Oh, yes UMIST was incorporated after I left and is now part of Manchester University. Go figure ... And now I am here, I joined the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies in 2001. Since January 2009, I have also been the director of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies. top |  |
ResearchI like working with language, thinking about it, and thinking about how it can be learnt as a second language. I also like working with computers - their writing is much cleaner than mine, their memory so much more reliable, and they are very good for working with language. If I had to state it in a nutshell, everything I do in my research has some connection to grammar - describing, learning, implementing - and computers. Not to worry, it's not as nerdy as it sounds. |
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First, I am interested in ICALL which stands for Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning. One way to describe ICALL would be to say it is the nexus of CALL and Artificial Intelligence - hence the adjective intelligent in front of CALL. Here, Artificial Intelligence means Natural Language Processing (NLP) - making computers understand (at least the structure of) human language and have them generate human language from some kind of computational data structure - and Student Modeling - creating and maintaining a data structure about the learning processes of a student and then using that data structure to infer further information about the student's learning: what feedback do they need to successfully correct an utterance or what learning material would be most beneficial for them next. For my PhD, I worked on Textana – a research prototype of a grammar checker for students of German. Using a parser Allan Ramsay, my doctoral supervisor, wrote, I tried to improve the system's 'knowledge of German' and have been working on it and with it a little ever since, but decided to go a different route with my new project - Mocha - which deals with student modeling in ICALL and relies on Dynamic Systems Theory and Construction Grammar. We are basically in the process of putting some NLP components together from scratch, we will then analyse learner texts and then build the model(s). Sounds straightforward and easy, doesn't it? Rest assured - it is not. Quite a bit of work by a whole team of people here at the University of Waterloo and at Simon Fraser University (Trude Heift). If this sparked your interest in ICALL, Trude and I wrote a book on it. |
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Second, I am involved in the research and development of online language learning courses. Together with colleagues of my Department and from other units of the University, we developed three distance education courses for elementary and intermediate German at university. This was the Geroline project. We gathered lots of data from our learners and conducted a learning impact study. (Yes, we finally figured out that our students did learn something with our online materials.) Later we tested tablet PCs in language learning, developed and researched an online course for intermediate learners of German (WatPAL project). The course has been taught a couple of times since and I will now try to convert it to a distance education course. All these courses are in our VLE UW-ACE. |
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And last but not least, I am interested in Bilingualism - yes, there is a link to grammar again... The Kitchener Metropolitan Census Area has the highest proportion of German speakers in Canada. The first ones arrived more than two hundred years ago, the last ones came even later than I did. I am interested in their history, the way they write, the way they think about German and how they learnt it. Oh, and if you like books, of course, there is one: on German minorities worldwide - language, culture, and history. |
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Research SupervisionCurrently, I am
supervising two PhD
students: Nikolai Penner: on Russian Mennonite German; and
Peter Wood: on ICALL,
morphology, and vocabulary acquisition; and two MA students:
Bjanka Pokorny: vocabulary learning and lexical frequency profiles;
Silke Reineke: discourses about the RAF in German print media. For the following MA and MSc theses, I was supervisor:
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