Maike Rocker is a Lecturer and Coordinator of the basic language program at the Ohio State University. In this capacity, she mentors Graduate Teaching Assistants in becoming effective foreign language teachers and . Her Master’s in Education from the University of Bremen as well as teaching German at the University of Waterloo (Canada), at SUNY Binghamton, and at PennState provided her with much theoretical knowledge and practical experience in second language acquisition.

Maike’s research focuses on language contact in Germanic heritage speaker communities and the effects of multilingualism on variation in morphosyntactic structures, sociocultural development, and identity construction. Her dissertation analyzed language shift and language change in a Low German-speaking community in Iowa, finding that the increased use of verb-third constructions follows predictable patterns and is not due to individual attrition effects. She has also presented and published on progressive constructions in Pennsylvania Dutch and the sociolinguistic development of a little-known German-Jewish settlement in Sosúa (Dominican Republic).