Jessica Ann Thonn, Petra Brunnhuber

Jessica A. Thonn has been teaching English, teaching methodology and learning strategies at the University of Florence for 30 years. During Italy’s teaching-teachers-about-CLIL phase and the worldwide English-mediated-instruction boom, she taught Elementary, High school and University instructors to use and teach pragmatic strategies, in addition to English. Always a language nerd, in recent years she has focused her attention on Intercomprehension, teaching students to understand Germanic languages, and to exploit affinities between the Romance and Germanic families in order to communicate effectively around Europe.

Petra Brunnhuber is a language expert at the Language Center and the FORLILPSI Department at the University of Florence where she teaches courses in German language, German literature and intercomprehension between Germanic languages. For many years, she was a lecturer in training and refresher courses for teachers of German language and literature at SSIS Toscana, and a member of the editorial board of the German studies journal Daf-werkstatt at the University of Siena. She frequently presents around the world on German language, Trends in contemporary German literature and Comparative literature.