About the person

Barbara Hinger studied Spanish and history/social studies for the teaching profession at the University of Graz and the University of Barcelona. She then completed a Master's degree in "Women's Studies" at the University of Barcelona and the university course "German as a Foreign Language" at the University of Graz, where she also began her doctoral studies. She completed her doctorate at the University of Innsbruck with a thesis on Spanish didactics, for which she was awarded the "Ludger Schiffler Prize for Foreign Language Didactics". Barbara Hinger worked for three years as an Austrian lecturer at the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain, in the field of German as a foreign language and Austrian cultural history. For five years she taught history/social studies and Spanish at an Austrian grammar school, where she was able to establish this subject as a second living foreign language. She has been teaching Spanish didactics since 1995. From 1997 to 2012, she worked at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Innsbruck, where she taught Spanish language history, selected areas of Spanish linguistics and subject didactics. From 2002 to 2020, she taught as part of the Innsbruck Model of Foreign Language Didactics (IMoF), which she initiated together with didactic colleagues from English, Latin and Slavic Studies and led until 2020. At the University of Innsbruck, she was head of the newly established Institute for Subject Didactics at the School of Education, now the Faculty of Teacher Education, from 2012 to 2020. From 2013 to 2020, she chaired the Curriculum Commission for Secondary General Education at the University of Innsbruck.

Barbara Hinger was a co-founder of the Austrian Society for Language Didactics (ÖGSD), founded in 2007, a board member until 2017 and its chairwoman from 2011 to 2015. She was a member of the expert group for the "Reform of the upper secondary school curriculum for English, French, Italian and Spanish" (2002-2004) for the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, scientific advisor for the redesign of the curricula (foreign languages) at secondary level I (2019-2020) for the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) and has been a subject didactics expert on the ministry's Federal Maturity Examination Commission since 2014.

Research visits have taken her to Australia, England and Spain, among other places. In 2012, she was awarded a teaching license for "Romance linguistics and language didactics". In her habilitation thesis, she dealt with the acquisition, teaching and assessment of Spanish in a school context. Her current research interests focus on the morphosyntactic acquisition of foreign languages, classroom-based assessment and multilingualism approaches in teacher training.

Barbara Hinger was a university professor of foreign language didactics at the Department of Language Didactics at the University of Innsbruck from 2012 to 2020. Since 2020, she has been working at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Graz and is Professor of Foreign Language Didactics.