Dr. Carrie Ankerstein

Routeburn Track, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand
Routeburn Track, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand

Dr. Carrie Ankerstein

Senior Lecturer ("Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben")

Areas of interest/expertise: Psycholinguistics and Applied Linguistics

Courses: Introduction to English Linguistics, English Phonetics and Phonology, Proseminars in Psycholinguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Advanced Written Expression, and Research Methods

Office Hours: by appointment (email me).

Email: c.ankerstein(at)mx.uni-saarland.de

Tel.: +49 (0)681 302 2083

I joined the English Department at Saarland University in the Winter Semester of 2008-2009. I hold a BA in German Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Certificate in German Philology from the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany. I completed my post-graduate studies in England with an MPhil in Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Psycholinguistics from the University of Sheffield. My research interests are in second language acquisition - in particular how we process sounds, words and sentences in our native and non-native languages - and how to best use AI in academia. Since 2014, I have participated in over 50 Science Slams across Germany.

Letters of Recommendation: Before you ask me for a letter of recommendation, please read through this document.

Guest Professorships

Research Interests:

  • Implicit Language Processing
  • Second Language Acquisition
  • Language and Thought
  • AI Tools and Language Teaching

Current Projects:

  • ChatGPT in the ESL Classroom
  • Online syntactic parsing in non-native speakers of English (funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation)
  • Semantic priming in a second language

Selected Publications:

Ankerstein, C. A. (2024). ChatGPT and Me: implementing and evaluating a custom GPT for written corrective feedback. Ubiquity Proceedings, 4(1), 32, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/uproc.154

Ankerstein, C.A. (2024). Inside Bo Burnham: Timelessly Capturing the Zeitgeist. In: Bernardi, V., Giammanco, A.D., & Mißler, H. (Eds.) Covid-19 in Film and Television: Watching the Pandemic. Routledge.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2024). A machine that still doesn’t quite understand us: putting ChatGPT to the test. English Today. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078423000433

Ankerstein, C.A. (2020). The Joy of Making Mistaeks – the imperfect polyglot. TESOLANZ News, 35(2), 8.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2019). The perpetuation of prescriptivism in popular culture. English Today, 35(3), 55-60.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2017). The role of the native language in foreign accents: Germans are not aiming for a fossilized form of English: a response to Booth (2015). English Today, 33(4), 30-32.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2014). A psycholinguistic measurement of second language proficiency: The coefficient of variation (pp. 109-121). In Leclercq, P., Edmonds A., & Hilton H. (Eds.) Measuring L2 proficiency: perspectives from SLA. Multilingual Matters: Bristol.

Ankerstein, C.A. & Morschett, R. (2013). Do you hear what I hear?: A comparison of phoneme perception in native and Saarlandian German nonnative speakers of English. Saarland Working Papers in Linguistics, 4, 1-8.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2011). Qualitatively similar automatic semantic priming in native and nonnative speakers. Proceedings of the fourth ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics ExLing 2011, 11-14.