Bachelor’s Thesis

We welcome students from all degree programs to write their Bachelor’s BA Theses at the Institute for English Business Communication. We offer a range of topics in the fields of business communication, cultural and language studies that you can explore in your projects. You will be supervised by an experienced member of staff, who will guide you through the process of composing a thesis and provide assistance with regard to academic concerns along the way.

In order to write your Bachelor’s Thesis at our Institute, you should meet the following requirements:

• You need to attend or have already passed the course on basic academic writing ("Grundlagen des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens"), preferably at our Department – essential.

• Additionally, you should demonstrate a high level of language competence in English, which enables you to write extended academic essays (as evidenced, for example, by good grades on your EBC classes) – essential.

If you are interested in writing your Bachelor’s Thesis at our Institute, we encourage you to get in touch with us. You can find a list of potential thesis supervisors and the respective topics on which they supervise Bachelor’s Theses below. You could also approach other faculty (not listed) with potential ideas for a thesis who could act as co-supervisors in conjunction with a main supervisor from the below list.

Once contact has been made, you will make further arrangements with your supervisor. This will involve discussing possible topic ideas as well as specific requirements relating to the structure, approach or methodology used in your thesis. You may also be asked to prepare a proposal on your chosen topic and formulate a research question. Only after the topic and proposal have been approved by your supervisor will you be given the go-ahead to write your thesis. In general, a bachelor's thesis will consist of a body of about 8,000-10,000 words and include a list of references/bibliography. You can find the style guide to be used for theses here.

Potential supervisors and their areas of supervision

Prof. Axel Beer

***currently not accepting new theses***

International marketing including market entry strategies, M&As, financial markets; Wide range of business topics comparing the U.S. and the German-speaking world

Dr. Mathew Gillings

Language and/of the law; (corporate) deception; corpus-based approaches to spoken and written workplace communication; politeness strategies in internal/external communication; language comprehension and perception

Dr. Martin Herles

British cultural studies with contrastive terminological Focus; Financial market terminology

Dr. Susanne Kopf

Communication and discourse(s) about organisations, institutions and business; social media and Wikipedia discourse; communication and discourse(s) about digital labour; persuasion and argumentation

Dr. Miya Komori-Glatz

English as a (business) lingua franca; Language and cultural issues in international Business; English in business education; (International) Marketing; Food and film in relation to business communication

Prof. Ursula Lutzky

Communicating with customers; Corporate apologies; Corporate blogs and microblogs; Crisis communication through various online media; The language of online consumer reviews

Prof. Gerlinde Mautner

Language in business and the law; leadership discourse; organizational discourse

Dr. Barbara Schmidt-Unterberger

English-medium instruction in business education; The internationalisation of higher education; ESP (English for Specific Purposes) Genre Analysis in business contexts; English for Business Purposes; Developing teaching materials for business education

Prof. Ruth Trinder

New technologies and Web 2.0 in internal/external business communication; Language and cultural issues in international businesses; Language needs and language training in business; English as the international language in business; Cultural and language issues in M&As

Prof. Almut Köster

*NOTE: Prof. Köster has retired and will only accept new theses in exceptional cases*

Spoken communication at work: language and management, communicating with customers; Language and cultural issues in international Business; English as the international language of Business; Language management: language training and education at work