Dr. Ulrike Behrens, born in 1967, received her Ph.D. at the University of Hildesheim and is now a lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany (UDE). Teaching language didactics for trainee teachers, her classes’ topics range from written language acquisition in primary schools to diagnostic and promotion of reading skills at all school levels. Recently, she has developed and implemented a concept for university seminars that has groups of students work autonomously on well-prepared sets of tasks instead of the traditional frontal teaching style.

In her research and publications, Ulrike focuses on oral communication skills in L1 education, particularly listening skills. With the Swiss-German project stịm·mig she developed and evaluated listening-specific test items. An English presentation of the project was published in L1 in 2019 (with Sebastian Weirich). The final stịm·mig results report and a textbook on oral communication in the classroom are two of Ulrike’s latest publications. She currently serves as scientific advisor for the test development of Vergleichsarbeiten (comparison tests for 3rd grade students) and participates in the standardization studies for the revised educational standards in Germany. Ulrike joined ARLE in 2018; she is also member of Symposion Deutschdidaktik e.V. (SDD) and Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik (GAL).