Peter W. Kunsmann, PhD is professor of English philology at the Freie Universität Berlin. His main research interests are sociolinguistics and problems of the use of English, linguistic theories and second language acquisition.
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Homepage: http//www.philologie.fu-berlin.de
 

Dorothee Meer, PhD, is working on a project on effective communication in lecturers’ office hours at the center of advanced education at Bochum University, where she is also a lecturer at the German department (linguistics). She conducts workshops for university teachers and students. Her main interests are conversation and discourse analysis, institutional communication (especially universities), media communication, political discourse analysis and television, linguistic pragmatics (theory), therapy and counselling, research about university teaching.
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Homepage: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/wbz/proj-sp.html
 

Christiane Meierkord received her Ph.D. in English linguistics at Düsseldorf University in 1996 for her thesis on English as medium for intercultural communication. Since 1997 she has been a lecturer at Erfurt University where she pursues her post-doctoral research project on Routine expressions and structures in child, adolescent and adult English learner language. Her major research interests are: English as international lingua franca, varieties of English, methodology of Discourse and Conversation Analysis and research into learner language.
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Katarína Miková, PhDr., (Banská Bystrica/Slowakia) is teaching business German at the faculty for economic sciences at Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica.
She is developing and testing concepts for the education of students of economic sciences in cooperation with managers of joint-venture companies in the Slowak Republic. Moreoever she is working with foreign DAF-practitioners at Matej Bel University.
Her research interests are oral communication, intercultural communication and the comparison of cultural standards as well as the methods of teaching German for foreign students (DAF).
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Homepage: http://www.econ.sk

Ingrid Piller is a research fellow with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) and works on the linguistic practices of bilingual couples. Previously she taught at Hamburg University, Ithaca College, NY, and the University of Technology in Dresden, where she also obtained her Ph.D. Besides her research on discourse analysis, multilingualism, second language learning, and language and gender, she has also worked on advertising language, trade names and consumer discourse. She is the author of American Automobile Names (Essen, 1996).
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Homepage: http://www.sultry.arts.usyd.edu.au/ipiller
 

Karin Pittner is professor of German linguistics at the University of Bochum. She previously taught at the universities of Munich (Dr. phil. 89) and Stuttgart (habil 97). Her main research interests are German syntax (with a special stress on word order and the positioning of adverbials), information structure, pragmatics, the relations between pragmatics and grammar. She is the author of Adverbiale im Deutschen. Untersuchungen zu ihrer Stellung und Interpretation. (Tübingen 1999).
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Ulrich A. Schmidt studied German, Romance languages and history at the University of Bochum. He wrote his prize-winning dissertation about impersonal constructions, diatheses and word order. He has been working as DAAD-lecturer in Italy and been lecturing at the universities of Bochum, Essen, Duisburg as well as Lomonossow-University in Moscow. He is currently working on a project about "application and communication" at the Institute for German studies in Bochum. He also conducted courses on environmental management for postgraduates. Since 1998 he is director of the Center for application training in Dorsten, which is counselling unemployed people. His main areas of research are German grammar, text linguistics, pragmatics, orthography and its reform, application and communication training.
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