Florian Thaller studied English, Geography and German as a Foreign Language (GFL) at Philipps-University Marburg, California State University, East Bay and Pennsylvania State University (both USA). He graduated with a first state examination for teaching at secondary schools and a master’s degree in GFL. Subsequently, he worked as a research assistant in the Department of German as a Foreign Language at the University of Marburg, taught GFL courses at the University Language Center, and gave continuing education courses for GFL teachers in Germany and abroad, including as an Erasmus guest lecturer at the American University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan). His research focuses on foreign language didactics and classroom research. Mr. Thaller is a member of the editorial board of the Journal for Interaction Research in DaFZ (ZIAF), founded in 2021, and is working on a doctoral thesis on classroom interaction, with a focus on teaching competencies of pre-service teachers of GFL. Since March 2023, Florian Thaller has been a DAAD Lecturer in the Department of German Language and Literature at Seoul National University, South Korea.

Andreas Leidig studied History, Latin Philology and German as a Foreign Language at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and completed two teaching internships in Seoul, South Korea (2012 at the German School Seoul International and 2014 at Ewha Womans University). After completing his master’s degree, he took a teaching assistant position at Yonsei University Seoul from 2015 to 2016, after which he continued his teacher training in Berlin. He successfully completed his teacher traineeship at Gabriele-von-Bülow Gymnasium in the winter of 2017/2018 and has since been working in the Berlin school service until he started his current position as a DAAD Lektor at Yonsei University Seoul in the summer of 2019.

Research interests: Linguistics, German as a Foreign Language, First and second languages in contrast. Janina Bajramovic studied German Language, Literature, Culture and Communication (B.A.), Practical Philosophy (B.A. and M.A.) and German as a Foreign Language (M.A.) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. During her studies, she worked as a tutor in Linguistics and as a student assistant on a research project about the standardization of German in Luxembourg in the 19th Century. Collecting data for her Bachelor thesis (Korean and German in Contrast, Phonetics) in 2017, Janina Bajramovic travelled to South Korea and visited the German faculty at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. During this three-month internship, she acquired knowledge of didactics and methods of German as a Foreign Language, which she’s been using as a German teacher since her return to Germany. Her Master thesis (2020) was also about the topic “German as a Foreign Language in South Korea”, thematizing the phonetic problems of Korean students of the German language and how to solve these in interactive and methodically multiple ways. In 2021, Janina Bajramovic started working as a Teaching Assistant at Pusan National University and has been a DAAD Lektor at the same university since March 2022.

Research interests: Literary translation and stylistics. Dominik Feise studied History and Protestant Religion at the Philipps University of Marburg. After the first state examination, he transferred to the Free University of Berlin, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in Latin philology and Korean studies. He then received a scholarship to train as a literary translator at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea in Seoul, where he intensively studied Korean and German literature, their translation, and the stylistics of the German language. Since then, he has been working as a freelance translator with the language combination Korean-German. Most recently, he worked as part of the Bosch Lectureship Program at Sichuan Foreign Language University in Chongqing and then as a librarian in the East Asia Department of the State Library of Berlin. Since March 2022, he has been a DAAD Lektor at the Department of German and European Studies at Keimyung University in Daegu.

Daniela Rehbein graduated with a Master’s degree in Asian Studies with focus on Korean Studies from Bonn University. During her studies, she spent three semesters as exchange student in Seoul – two semesters at Duksung Women’s University and one semester at Seoul National University. While focusing her research on the Korean education system during her Bachelor’s, in her Master’s she started to investigate in comparative linguistics comparing the German and Korean language. As a result of this change in her research interest, Ms. Rehbein took further education in the field of German as Foreign and Second Language while pursuing her Master’s degree. During her studies, she worked for several years as a Student Assistant in the Department of Japanese and Korean Studies at Bonn University, where she organized and conducted supplementary Korean classes for undergraduate students. Further teaching experiences she gained at a private international high school in Bonn, where she gave German classes for foreign students. Since March 2023 Ms. Rehbein is working as Teaching Assistant at Pusan National University.