- Robert Phillipson is an Emeritus Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. British by origin, he studied at Cambridge and Leeds Universities, UK, and has a doctorate from the University of Amsterdam. He worked for the British Council in Algeria, Yugoslavia, and London, before emigrating to Denmark in 1973. His main books are Linguistic imperialism (Oxford University Press, 1992), English-only Europe? Challenging language policy (Routledge, 2003), updated and translated into French as La domination de l’anglais: un défi pour l’Europe (Libre & Solidaire, 2019), and Linguistic imperialism continued (Routledge, 2009). He has co-edited books on language rights and multilingual education, including Why English? Confronting the Hydra (2016) and Language Rights (four volumes, with his wife, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, 2017). He was awarded the UNESCO Linguapax prize in 2010. Details of publications and CV.
Robert Phillipson
Keynote speaker
Copenhagen Business School
- Elin Thordardottir, a native of Iceland, received her training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Double clinical MS degree in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology 1994, Ph.D. 1998). She has been faculty at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill since 1998, where she teaches courses on developmental language disorder (DLD) in monolingual and bilingual children, its nature, underlying causes, assessment and intervention. She runs research labs in Montreal and in Iceland, and lectures regularly at the University of Iceland.
Her research focuses on the normal language acquisition and language disorders in children learning one or more languages, the assessment of bilingual and multilingual children and intervention efficacy. This work has a strong cross-linguistic focus, comparing languages that differ in structure, and also a strong focus on environmental factors, notably comparing the very distinct multilingual environments of Montreal and Iceland. Elin is the author of several language assessment tools in Icelandic and French. She has worked closely with school boards and impacted policy making. Recently, Elin was vice-chair of a European multi-national research network focusing on the treatment of oral language impairment across countries of Europe and beyond (Cost Action IS1406). She is frequently invited to give research talks and continuing education workshops across the world, recently in Iceland, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and Austria.
Elin Thordardottir
McGill University
- Mirjam Laurisaar has worked in the IT industry for the better part of her career with previous positions at Skype and Microsoft. She is currently leading the Estonian recruitment team at Pipedrive, one of the fastest growing tech companies in Estonia. She has been surrounded by different cultures and languages throughout her past and current jobs, from Customer Service to Tourism to HR. She loves diversity and working for global companies, but at the same time feels strongly connected to her own Estonian roots. She is keen on finding a good balance between maintaining Estonian culture and language while working in a multinational organisation.
Mirjam Laurisaar
Pipedrive
- Theo Marinis is Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz and at the University of Reading. His research focuses on language acquisition and processing across populations of typically and atypically developing learners and aims to uncover the nature of language processing in typical and atypical language development. His research has been funded by research councils, like the ESRC (Real-time processing of syntactic information in children with English as a Second Language & children with Specific Language Impairment), the ESRC-DFID (Multilingualism & Multiliteracy), the NWO (Cross-linguistic study of the production and processing of grammatical morphemes in L2 children compared to children with Specific Language Impairment), and the ESRC-GCRF project ‘ProLanguage’ that addressed the protective role of language in global migration and mobility.
He was part of the COST Action IS0804 ‘Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society’ and led the development of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks for multilingual children across a large range of languages. He currently leads the EU project ‘The Multilingual Mind’ that conducts multi-disciplinary research and provides training on multilingualism to early stage researchers in Europe. He is the Directing the Center for Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz that coordinates research and organises transfer activities on language and multilingualism to professionals and the general public. He has published his research widely in international journals and books. He is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Child Language, Applied Psycholinguistics, Second Language Research, Language Acquisition, and Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.
Theo Marinis
University of Konstanz, University of Reading
- Monika S. Schmid is Head of Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. She obtained her PhD in English Linguistics in 2000 from the Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf. The topic of her thesis was First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance: the case of German Jews in Anglophone Countries. She has since held positions at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Since September 2013 she has been a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Essex.
Her work has focused on various aspects of first language attrition. She has published two monographs and edited several collected volumes and special issues of journals on this topic, most recently the Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition (2019). She has received funding from various sources, including the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Dutch National Science Foundation NWO and the Economics and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) for her work.
Monika S. Schmid
University of Essex
- Kerttu Rozenvalde currently works at the Department of Language Development of the Latvian Language Agency where she carries out sociolinguistic research. From 2011 to 2017 she worked as lecturer of the Estonian language and culture at the University of Latvia. Among her fields of research are language and higher education policies. She recently defended her PhD dissertation that investigated the interplay of languages in higher education comparatively in Estonia and Latvia.
Kerttu Rozenvalde
Department of Language Development of the Latvian Language Agency
- Antonella Sorace is Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. She is a world leading authority and has published widely in the field of bilingual language development, where she brings together methods from linguistics, experimental psychology, and cognitive science. She is also committed to disseminating the findings of research on bilingualism in different sectors of society. She is the founding director of the research and information centre Bilingualism Matters, which currently has 26 branches in 3 different continents.
Antonella Sorace
University of Edinburgh
- Erika Hoff is Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University. Her research addresses the relations among properties of children’s early environments, their language experience, and their language development. She is the Principal Investigator on an NICHD-funded longitudinal study of Spanish-English bilingual development. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters; she is the author of the textbook, Language Development; and she is the editor of multiple books on early language development, including Research Methods in Child Language: A Practical Guide and, with Peggy McCardle, Childhood Bilingualism: Research on Infancy through School Age.
Erika Hoff
Florida Atlantic University
- Sanita Lazdiņa is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Rēzekne Academy of Technologies in Rēzekne, Latvia. Since 2016 she has also been a Senior Expert in the ESF project A Competence-based Approach to Learning Processes conducted by the National Centre for Education in Latvia, in which she is leading an expert group for developing a new school curriculum for Latvian in primary and secondary schools of Latvia. In 2009-2010 she worked as a guest professor at University of Greifswald (Germany), and in 2014 she was a visiting scholar at Tallinn University with support from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research and the Archimedes Foundation.
Among her fields of research are language and educational policies, approaches and methods in language acquisition (L1 and L2), monoglossic and heteroglossic ideologies in language education, but also multilingualism in the Baltic States in general, e.g. with regard to regional and minority languages, the economic value of less used languages, folk linguistics and other issues. Her articles have been published in Sociolinguistica, Current Issues in Language Planning, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe and others. Together with Heiko F. Marten, she has co-edited the book Multilingualism in the Baltic States. Societal Discourses and Contact Phenomena (2019, Palgrave Macmillan).
Sanita Lazdina
Rēzekne Academy of Technologies
- Sari Pöyhönen is Professor of Applied Linguistics and deputy head of department at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research and writing (ca 100 publications, including over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles) focus on language, identity and belonging; minorities and language rights; migration, asylum and settlement; and adult migrant language education policies. Through linguistic ethnography, creative inquiry and narrative approaches she focuses on language issues within wider cultural and political contexts and social structures. Currently, she is PI of three research projects: Jag bor i Oravais (everyday life of adults and unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Swedish Ostrobothnia, Svenska Kulturfonden), Toinen koti – Other home (Documentary theatre project based in the Finnish National Theatre, Academy of Finland), and Rajojen yli – Crossing Borders (Artistic practices in performing and narrating belonging, Academy of Finland).
Sari Pöyhönen
University of Jyväskylä
- Claudia Maria Riehl is professor for German Linguistics and German as a Foreign Language. She is chair of the Institute of German as a Foreign Language and director of the International Research Unit of Multilingualism (IFM) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her research interests are sociolinguistic and cognitive aspects of multilingualism, language contact, minority languages and language policy, multiliteracy, and second language teaching. Professor Riehl is the author of many titles, among them the German-speaking introduction into multilingualism and multilingualism research (Mehrsprachigkeit: Eine Einführung. Darmstadt: WBG 2014).
Claudia Maria Riehl
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
- Nayr Correia Ibrahim is Associate Professor of English Subject Pedagogy at Nord University in Bodø, Norway. Originally from South Africa, where she grew up multilingual, Nayr has worked in Portugal, Cairo, Hong Kong and 20 years in Paris, where she headed the Young Learner and Bilingual Education programmes for the Teaching Centre at the British Council.
Nayr’s interests include early language learning, bi/multilingualism, multiple literacies and language and identity. Nayr holds an MA in TEFL and a PhD in trilingualism, triliteracy and identity from the University of Reading. She has published articles and chapters on bi/multilingualism and identity in books and journals, such as, Multilingual Matters and the Encyclopaedia of Language and Education. She has also contribute to projects on multilingualism in the EU: she was on a panel of experts reviewing the EU’s Key Competencies for Lifelong Learning (2018) and contributed to the ECML project, Early Language Learning: Inspiring language learning in the early years.
Nayr’s research also focuses on children’s voices, learning to learn in the language classroom, children’s language rights and authentic children’s literature for cross-curricular and intercultural development. Her publication, Teaching children how to learn, Delta Publishing, with Gail Ellis, won an award at the 2016 ESU English Language Awards in the category, Resources for Teachers. Nayr is a member of the Nord Research Group for Children’s Literature in ELT (CLELT).
Nayr Correia Ibrahim
Nord University
- Working practice
2015 – still: Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Deputy Minister, Head of the EU Operational Programmes Section
2014 – 2015: Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, Head of the Civil Service Department, Director of the Legislation and State Development Department
2011 – 2014: EDUA Group (Czech private educational companies), development manager
2009 – 2016: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education, PhD student; GA UK (Grant agency of the Charles University), researcher
2008 – 2014: Ministry of the Interior, project manager
2007: Fraunhofer Institut, Zentrum für Mittel- und Osteuropa, Leipzig, Germany, researcher
Education
2009 – 2012: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education (field of study: Pedagogy); Ph.D. thesis ”School as a national policy”
2003 – 2009: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education (field of study: Czech language and literature, history); Master’s thesis: “Literary and non-Literary in the new Czech language”
2007 – 2008: University of Leipzig, Philological Faculty
Activities in education; lecturer and author of publications in areas of European Structural and Investment Funds, Czech public service, Czech – German relations, Czech language policy and Czech history. 
Václav Velčovský
Deputy Minister
Head of the EU Operational Programmes Section
Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic