Organizing committee

Diane Potts

Diane Potts is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on the meaning-making potential that plurilingual learners bring to the classroom, including the linguistic, multimodal and discursive resources that cut across learners’ lives. She has taught and researched in classrooms in English-dominant and non-English dominant contexts and worked extensively in teacher education programmes. At the core of her research is an interest in the semiotic demands of remaking knowledge across contexts for new purposes and new audiences. She has published in journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, and Language and Education and is author of the forthcoming volume Multilingualism, Multimodality and the Recontextualization of Knowledge.

Kirsten Rosiers

Kirsten Rosiers is a postdoctoral assistant at Ghent University. Her research in Belgian classrooms is inspired by linguistic ethnographical data collection and analysis and focuses on multilingual data. In her PhD “translanguaging, trend or asset”, she studied how pupils and teachers in primary classrooms engaged interactionally with their linguistic repertoire. For a postdoctoral project at Université Libre de Bruxelles, she analysed how teachers reconcile a monolingual policy with a multilingual reality in Brussels secondary education. In a more recent project, she investigates how the internationalisation of universities impacts on the implementation of English in higher education and the multilingualism that is related to these processes.

Stef Slembrouck

Stef Slembrouck is a senior full professor in the Linguistics Department at Ghent University. He is also director of the University Language Centre at Ghent University. He has published extensively on language use, interaction and communication in institutional and professional contexts (education, social welfare, child protection, administration, health). A considerable part of his work concentrates on the nature and implications of globalization-affected multilingualism. He teaches courses on interactional analysis, sociolinguistics and theory and methods of second language acquisition research. He is currently preparing a monograph on the home visiting professional (Cambridge University Press, w/ Chris Hall and Karen Broadhurst). Other book publications include: “Globalization and Language in Contact. Scale, Migration, and Communicative Practices” (Bloomsbury 2009, w/ Mike Baynham and Jim Collins) and “The Multilingual Edge of Education” (Palgrave 2018, w/ Piet Van Avermaet, Koen Van Gorp, Sven Sierens and Katrijn Maryns).

Piet Van Avermaet

Piet Van Avermaet is head of the Centre for Diversity and Learning, at the Linguistics Department of Ghent University. He teaches ‘multicultural studies’, ‘multilingualism in education’ and ‘langiage policy’ at the same University. His expertise and research interests cover topics related to multilingualism in education, social ineaquality in education, language policy and practice in education, language policy and practice in contexts of (social) inclusion, language assessment, diversity and inclusion, integration and participation, discrimination in education, migration