Marianne Hepp is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Pisa, Department of Philology, Literature, Linguistics. Her main research interests are text-linguistic approaches in second and multilingual language acquisition (focusing on English-German comprehension), German morphology and word formation, the relationship between text types in everyday usage and their rendition in literary texts and language policy. Guest professorships and scientific project cooperation at international level. Since 2009 she has been President of the worldwide International Association for Teachers of German as a Foreign Language (IDV-Internationaler Deutschlehrerverband).