Hello! My name is Emily Heidrich, and I currently work as the Project Manager for two of CeLTA’s grant projects: The Language Proficiency Flagship Initiative and the LCTL Partnership. I am originally from a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, but I most recently lived in Madison, Wisconsin for graduate studies in German and Second Language Acquisition. (I defended my dissertation on Friday!) 

I originally became interested in learning languages through my involvement with an international peace education organization called CISV. Over the years, I developed friendships with people from all over the world and marveled at all of the languages being spoken at the programs I attended. I began to study German in high school and then pursued a double major in German and Spanish at Wittenberg University (Springfield, Ohio), where I received my B.A. This love of languages propelled me into the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant program, where I spent about a year teaching English in Mainz, Germany. 

During my time at UW-Madison, I did linguistic fieldwork on Wisconsin German dialects, forayed into students’ use of web-based machine translation, and focused my M.A. project on reintegration into the foreign language classroom after a study abroad experience. My dissertation specifically examines learners’ personal connections with speakers of German, the German language, and affiliated cultures and compares the number and types of reported connections with learners’ perceptions of and affective responses to the classroom community. 

I am looking forward to working with my colleagues here at Michigan State on a variety of projects and research!