DGFF Kassel 2025 – Field Notes
Every two years, the German Society for Foreign Language Research (DGFF) gathers scholars, teachers, and policymakers around a major conference for Fremdsprachendidaktik in Germany – a space where theories of language learning meet the lived practice of classrooms, and where the questions shaping Europe’s linguistic future are negotiated.
This year, the Kongress´topic was Sustainability of Learning and Teaching Foreign Languages (Nachhaltigkeit beim Lehren & Lernen von Fremdsprachen). Participants travelled to Kassel, bringing with them research on multilingualism, sustainability, language identity and diversity, digitalisation, and the many fractures and transformations running through schools and universities.
I went there because this resonates precisely with the fabric of my work, which moves between art and language, between English and German, between the multilingual repertoires of my students and the institutional frame of a Berlin Gymnasium. I call this approach CLILi – Content and Language Integrated Learning plus Identity. At its core is the conviction that students learn not only through subject matter and foreign languages, but also by bringing their own biographies, heritage languages, and cultural repertoires into play.
Right after my last course on Thursday, I hopped on an ICE to Kassel and attended five keynote lectures – driven by the question: how do current debates in foreign language pedagogy connect to what I witness daily — teenagers negotiating language, identity, and art in real time? The following reflections are not exhaustive reports; they are snapshots. They capture what stayed with me on the way back to Berlin, and why these impulses matter if we take seriously that education in 2025 is always already multilingual, and that identity is not a distraction from learning but its very condition.
Lost in Transformation? — Prof. Dr. Daniel Fischer (Leuphana, Lüneburg)
Prof. Daniel Fischer’s keynote Lost in Transformation linked language awareness to the intensely debated concept of Education for Sustainable Development (BNE/ESD). What stayed with me were his words on Sprachbewusstsein:
Sensibilität für die Fragilität des Verstehens — awareness of how precarious understanding is.
Ambiguitätstoleranz — the strength to endure ambiguity instead of erasing it.
Metakognition über Emotionen und Motivationen — noticing how feelings and drives shape learning.
Sprachbewusstsein as a critical resource for discourse in today’s heated sustainability debates.
For Fischer, these are systemic challenges. For me, they mirror daily practice: students switching between German, English, and their heritage languages while building a visual argument about art. They are not just learning vocabulary; they are inhabiting fragile spaces of understanding, practicing ambiguity, enacting transformation.
Functional Multilingualism and SuDoLanCos — Britta Hufeisen (TU Darmstadt)
In her keynote, Britta Hufeisen shifted the lens from multilingualism as individual repertoire to multilingualism as institutional ecology. Her key term: funktionale Mehrsprachigkeit — situationally appropriate competences across L1, L2, and further languages, activated according to context.
She introduced Dominant Language Constellations (DLCs, Aronin 2022) and extended them into the supra-individual: SuDoLanCos (supra-dominant language constellations). These emerge where personal repertoires meet institutional policies – the seminar, the Mensa, the Arbeitsgruppe, the university itself.
Why study SuDoLanCos? Because they reveal the volatile “Zwischenräume” where transformation occurs: between heritage languages and lingua francas, between bottom-up repertoires and top-down policies. Hufeisen illustrated with Darmstadt’s Sprachenkonzept (2021/22), embedding multilingualism in internationalisation: multilingual signage, recognition of heritage languages, digital expansion, and professionalisation of communicative competences across status groups.
Her message: multilingualism is not mother tongue versus lingua franca. It is constellations – individual, institutional, societal – through which sustainable participation and democratic inclusion can be built.
Racism and English Teaching — Alena Beck (TU Braunschweig)
Alena Beck examined how future English teachers conceptualize racism and antiracist pedagogy. Her delivery was fast-paced, but the core stood out: a qualitative study of 22 trainee teachers, many voicing hesitation, discomfort, avoidance. Racism was often externalized to “the US” or “British colonial history,” rarely acknowledged as part of German classrooms.
What struck me was their raw honesty: “Als weißer Mann ist es halt schwierig … den richtigen Ton zu treffen.” Or: “Ich würde das dann eher von Expert:innen übernehmen lassen.” These are not failures but symptoms of a training system that avoids positionality and responsibility.
Her conclusion: teacher education must make space for identity work, discomfort, and critical self-location. To teach English today is to face language not only as communication, but as history, privilege, fracture.
Unterrichtserleben von Schüler*innen: Einblicke in Wahrnehmung, Erwartungen und Lernbarrieren — Nadine Wenke
Nadine Wenke focused on Unterrichtserleben — the lived experience of lessons from the student perspective. Not grades, but how learners actually experience lessons. Building on Reusser’s model, she framed experience as a triangle of institution, teacher, subject matter, and students.
Her study asked how students experience bilingual offers, how they respond to code-switching, scaffolding, and teacher-designed materials. The answers were nuanced. Code-switching could be relief — “a break from English” — or confusion: “At the end I didn’t know anything anymore.” Word lists, scaffolding, and clear technical terms provided security. Experiments and models made abstract content tangible. Here, students spoke less of language hurdles and more of engagement: “It was fun, and I learned something for English, too.”
Most reported gains in language learning, stronger interest in bilingual formats, and greater self-confidence. For Wenke, Unterrichtserleben is not marginal but the point where didactic theory and student reality meet — where learning either comes alive or remains empty.
The Swiss Lens on Language and Sustainability — Klára Sokol (éducation21)
Klára Sokol, director of éducation21, Switzerland’s national competence center for ESD, closed with a keynote that left a mark. Switzerland – four languages, countless dialects, additional migrational languages, divergent cultural readings of the same terms – offers a model of cohesion through negotiated diversity.
Sokol insisted that ESD is not an “extra subject” but a pedagogical approach rooted in ecological urgency and framed through didactics and learning theory. She showed how ESD aligns with foreign language teaching by cultivating intercultural awareness, empathy, autonomy, and respect. Examples ranged from vocabulary tasks around sustainability themes, to interdisciplinary projects linking geography, ethics, and art, to simulations where students imagined future societies.
She acknowledged the gaps – ESD school literature still in progress – but pointed to open-access trilingual resources already available through éducation21. Her keynote reframed teaching itself as a cultural and ethical project, where sustainability, diversity, and language converge.
Conclusion
Leaving Kassel, I brought back a sharpened sense of direction. Each keynote exposed a facet of what I recognize in my own classroom: multilingual constellations, uncomfortable truths, lived experience, and the demand to connect language to the larger question of how we inhabit the world.
For me, CLILi — Content and Language Integrated Learning plus Identity — is not a side project, but a framework I coined to capture the specific intersection of language, identity, and art in my teaching. Until now I have only used it privately, but Kassel marks the first time I name it publicly. DGFF confirmed what CLILi asserts: multilingualism and identity are not distractions from learning. They are the condition of learning in 2025.
DGFF Kongress, Kassel, September 26, 2025
Lost in Transformation?- Prof. Dr. Daniel Fischer
Functional Multilingualism - Prof. Dr. Britta Hufeisen
Racism and English Teaching - Alena Beck
Unterrichtserleben von Schüler*innen - Nadine Wenke
So bereichern Fremdsprachenunterricht und BNE einander - Klára Sokol