Brazilian of German descent and an Italian citizen, she is Ordinary Professor of Psychology of Language and Communication at the Faculty of Psychology 1 at Università di Roma “La Sapienza”. Before being ordinary professor, she was extraordinary professor, associate professor, researcher and at the very beginning of her career she was appointed a scholarship after having spent two years working as a volunteer, and after graduating from college magna cum laude. She spent her scholarship years in Germany, at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Heidelberg, as a fellowship appointee of the Humboldt Foundation.
When she was associate professor she taught Observation Techniques of Children Behaviour and this allowed her to learn a lot about children and to relate observation to language. Therefore from her thesis on the leitmotiv of her research has always been language, considered as a learning process: native language, second language and bilingualism.
During this period of research she has gradually uncovered the reasons for academic failure specifically in the study of foreign languages and she has created teaching models that can provide the best opportunity for the acquisition of a foreign language not only for children but also for teenagers, adults, the elderly and the disabled. With the help provided by a number of collaborators (Renato Corsetti, Anna Lerna, Marco Cacioppo, Danila Taglialatela, Sabine Pirchio and Pasquale Rinaldi), and by a huge quantity of graduation theses and some doctorate thesis developed in Italy and abroad, it was possible to scientifically verify the theoretical constructs.
For years she has been “passionate” about the Socrates/Language European projects which have allowed her to divulge the results of her research among her European partners, beside providing funding to transform her ideas into practical activities. This is how “The adventures of Hocus & Lotus” were created, consisting of materials and teaching strategies that can be used by those who want to successfully learn one or more languages. At the moment she is busy with a new academic challenge, along with her collaborators: teaching a foreign language to Kindergarten children, that is to say, from the age of 6 months onward!
With the help of partners, family and friends, she has created (to this day) 52 stories with their gestures, which constitute the main part of the “Adventures” from which the other activities derive: the gestural theatrical action (called narrative format), the mini-musical and the cartoon. The latter is a product of three important partnerships: Rai fiction, Province of Bolzano-Bozen and the European Community.
Traute Taeschner speaks 5 languages fluently: Portuguese, German, Italian, English and Spanish. | 
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| He was born and raised in Rome, except for some time spent studying, working and teaching in other cities, in Italy and abroad. In his life he has worked on many different things, but they can all be gathered in two categories: work organization with electronic systems and linguistics. Let us leave the first category aside, although it was his main focus for two decades, and let us come to linguistics. When he was young he worked mainly on the politics of language (his book Lingua e Politica, Roma: Officina Edizioni, 1976 was quite a success among some extreme activists at the time) but then he moved on to the research on the process of acquisition of the native language and on child bilingualism, urged also by personal necessities: he had to educate two children in three languages, which was a successful experiment. In that period he wrote dozens of articles on the issues related to child bilingualism. Then his interest shifted naturally to the teaching of foreign languages to young children, more or less in primary school. For over a decade he collaborated in the creation of the materials used in the method “The adventures of Hocus & Lotus” in the laboratory of Analysis of Communication and Language at the Faculty of Psychology at Università di Roma 'La Sapienza'.
He had a lot of fun watching this method develop and observing how Italian children, as well as children in Holland, Spain, England, etc... could use their mental 'computer' to analyze the material presented to them in a foreign language.
Having no imagination and being unable to create stories he focused mainly on the linguistic analysis of the material which was being offered to children and on the children’s acquisition of this material (See mental computer mentioned earlier). The results of the analyses performed on the acquisition of several languages were collected on a number of publications, and were presented at scientific conventions, etc. He was professor of Psychopedagogy of Language and of Communication at the Faculty of Psychology 1 and in that period he led many researches performed as part of graduation theses on this subject and he even had to learn Dutch to follow the developments of some students who were being taught Dutch by Hocus and Lotus, in a primary school in Rome.
He speaks, in decreasing order of fluency, Italian, Esperanto, English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch. |
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She was born in Brindisi and for many years she has lived studied and worked in Rome where she majored in Clinical Psychology at Università “La Sapienza”, with a graduation thesis on the results of an experimentation on the teaching of the German language to Italian primary school children with the Narrative Format. For over a decade she has had an active role in the collaboration with Professor Traute Taeschner, at the chair of Psycholinguistics and Techniques of Child Behaviour Observation, working on experimentation, European research projects and various studies in the field of bilingualism. Specifically, as a psycholinguist and expert in informatized systems for linguistic analyses (for example, CHILDES, ESLA) she has elaborated important data relevant for the validation of the methodological approach of the Narrative Format “The Adventures of Hocus & Lotus”.
In the past few years, as a psycholinguist, she has worked in research and clinical psychology, in the field of Psychopatology of Development, at Istituto Scientifico E. Medea (“La Nostra Famiglia” association) in the district of Ostuni. She is the author of a number of studies on the experimentation of the clinical implementation of the concept of “Narrative Format” to effect and develop linguistic and socio-communicative competence in mentally challenged children, as well as in children with Down syndrome and Acoustic impairment. | 
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| Doctor of Research and psychotherapist, he was born and raised in Rome where immediately after graduating from high school (Liceo Scientifico), he began working in the pharmaceutical industry and in the swimming pool in a sports club. After working for about four years he started feeling uncomfortable in that role and, after many vicissitudes, he decided to enroll into College. It is never too late!
He kept his part-time job, and under the influence of some intriguing recounts of his uncle, a psychoanalyst, he began to study psychology, which first became his passion and later on, his job!
He wrote his thesis under the tutorship of Prof. Taeschner, with whom he established a stimulating collaboration on the research project “Hocus & Lotus”. With Prof. Taeschner and other collaborators he analytically observed the teachers involved in the project and he managed to locate the behavioural patterns which make certain teaching habits “magic”. The experience he acquired during this project allowed him to test himself practically: he started working with “Hocus & Lotus” and the two classes of first grade children; he became part of the staff of training classes for teachers; he collaborated with the Chair of “Techniques of Child Behaviour Observation”, teaching in classes and workshops for students. |
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She was born in France and she lived there for the first 6 years of her life; when her family moved to Italy she became bilingual, speaking Italian and French, and she became interested in languages and in language learning.
She majored in Psychology with a thesis on conversation in families and during her research doctorate she worked on the communication skills of children with atypical development, and then in 2002 she entered the world of Hocus & Lotus thanks to a research grant.
In 2005 she became researcher at the University of Cagliari, where she taught (among many things) Psychology of the Linguistic Development and she directed laboratories on the observation of child behaviour. She is currently working at Università “La Sapienza” in Rome where she is researching language acquisition, bilingualism and teaching/learning of a foreign language at school with the Narrative Format model.
She is the author of some studies on the use of narrative format in teaching the second language in primary school, as well as in the linguistic education of mentally and linguistically challenged children (in the pictures, in front of the poster presented on this issue at the AIP convention in Cagliari in 2005) and in teaching Italian to immigrants students in Italy.
She can speak Italian, French and English and she understands the Sardinian dialect a little whereas unfortunately she can only read Esperanto. However, using gestures and facial expressions she managed to communicate with people who speak other languages, and with the little ones who speak none! | 
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| Born in Rome, she majored in Molecular Biology at La Sapienza University, but during her college years she developed a special interest in comic book paleontology.
When Prof. Taeschner got her involved in her project, Giulia studied an ancient fossil, extraordinarily well-kept (see pictures below) and she discovered it belonged to an unknown species: the DINOCROCS!
With their dinosaur tail and a pretty crocodile tooth, these little dinocrocs, equipped with a nice belly button, convinced her to leave NewYork, where she was studying to get a master degree in Scientific Journalism, to dedicate herself completely to them.
Her hands created the two characters, the environment in which they live, the magic park, and all of Hocus & Lotus’ friends.
As their own agent, she develops the didactic material, in collaboration with the research team directed by Prof. Taeschner.
She is currently working as administrator of Hocus&Lotus’s company as well as being the creator of the website you are presently visiting.
She speaks Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English... phew!! |
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