Moving English Language Teaching Forward

Magne Dypedahl er førstelektor i engelsk ved Universitetet i Sørøst-Norge. Han har erfaring fra undervisning i videregående skole og arbeid med flere læreverk. Han har vært medredaktør og medforfatter for mange antologier om engelsk fagdidaktikk. Hans spesialområder er amerikansk kulturkunnskap og interkulturell kompetanse.

Janice Bland is Professor of English Education, Nord University. She focuses on English language and literature pedagogy and her research interests are concerned with creativity in ELT with elementary and secondary school children: creative writing, children’s literature from picturebooks to young adult fiction, visual and critical literacy, global issues, interculturality and drama methodology. Professor Bland leads the Nord Research Group for Children’s Literature in ELT and is editor-inchief of the diamond open-access journal Children’s Literature in English Language Education (CLELEjournal). Among her publications are two monographs and three edited volumes; one of the latter, Teaching English to Young Learners – Critical Issues in Language Teaching with 3–12 Year Olds (2015), is used as core reading on teacher education programmes at universities worldwide. Her latest book Compelling Stories for English Language Learners: Creativity, Interculturality and Critical Literacy will appear with Bloomsbury Academic in 2022.

Cecilie Waallann Brown is Associate Professor of ELT methodology at the Department of Education and Sports Science, University of Stavanger, where she is teaching pre- and in-service teacher education courses on literature and culture, and linguistics. Brown has recently defended her PhD thesis titled “Critical visual literacy and intercultural learning in English foreign language classrooms: An exploratory case study”.

Tony Burner er professor i engelsk ved lærerutdanningene ved Universitetet i Sørøst-Norge og professor II ved OsloMet – Storbyuniversitetet. Han har også erfaring fra undervisning i ungdomsskole, videregående opplæring og voksen­opplæringer i fagene norsk, engelsk og samfunnsfag. Burner har doktorgrad i profesjonsforskning med innretning mot lærerutdanning og skole, hvor han skrev om formativ skrivevurdering i engelskklasser på ungdomstrinnet. I tillegg til klasseromsvurdering har han skoleutvikling, læreres profesjonelle utvikling, veiledning, flerspråklighet og mangfoldskompetanse som forskningsinteresser.

Michael Byram has been Professor Emeritus since October 2008. Byram began his professional life as a teacher of foreign languages in secondary education in England, complemented by work in adult education. He then moved to the University of Durham to the School of Education, where he worked for almost 30 years, first in initial teacher education and then increasingly in doctoral education. From the 1990s until recently, Byram was adviser and expert at the Council of Europe in language policy and intercultural and democratic citizenship.

Christian Carlsen is Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where he teaches English language, language pedagogy, and Old Norse literature. Carlsen’s research focuses on multilingualism, literature in language teaching, and literary history. He has co-edited anthologies in the field of language teaching and co-authored English textbooks for lower secondary school.

Mona Evelyn Flognfeldt is Associate Professor of English language and language pedagogy at the Faculty of Education and International Studies at OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on the teaching of English in multilingual primary education, teacher cognition, and sustainable vocabulary development.

Jena Habegger-Conti is Associate Professor of English at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences where she teaches and researches in intercultural education and multimodal literacy. Her most recent publication is “‘Where am I in the text?’ Using positioning in refugee comics for intercultural education” (2021).

Vilde Smeby Hammershaug has a Master of Arts in Educational Sciences for Teacher Education from Oslo Metropolitan University. Her main research interest is self-regulated learning and learning strategies. In 2021 she delivered her MA thesis, which presents a qualitative study on language learning strategies, based on perspectives from the national curriculum and lower-secondary teachers’ beliefs and experiences.

Sissil Lea Heggernes is an associate professor at Oslo Metropolitan University, where she teaches literature and culture. Her PhD study from 2021 explores how interaction with texts can foster English language students’ intercultural learning, with a particular focus on the role of picturebooks. She is currently involved in a project on how engagement with picturebooks and news reports can foster critical thinking in young learners. She has also published work on intercultural learning and the role of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in the Norwegian English language curriculum. Heggernes has worked many years in primary and secondary schools. Her research interests include children’s literature, intercultural learning, critical thinking, reading, dialogic learning, and language teachers’ professional development.

Hild Elisabeth Hoff is Associate Professor of English didactics at the University of Bergen (Norway), where she teaches and supervises student teachers of English. Hoff’s research focuses on the intercultural dimension of language teaching and learning, and her work on intercultural competence and literature studies has been published internationally.

Sara Barosen Liverød is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where she teaches literature in English, English grammar, and English didactics. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Roehampton University in London, England, and her Master of Arts from the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her main research interests are the use of literature and video games in second language acquisition, the latter stemming from more than 20 years of gaming experience. She is currently pursuing a dr.philos. in the area of English didactics, focusing on video games in second language acquisition.

Catharine Veronica Perez Meissner is Assistant Professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. She has taught at and worked with teachers in secondary schools in Norway, and she currently teaches English didactics to student and in-service teachers. Her research interests lie in the field of English didactics and literacy, particularly in the assessment of writing.

Juliet Munden is docent emeritus at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. She has taught English at secondary schools in Norway and Kenya, and worked with teacher education in Norway, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Eritrea and Zambia. She is the author of workbooks, a textbook series for English learners in primary school, and three professional textbooks in English didactics for teacher education. Her PhD and research publications have focused on reading didactics and on curriculum development in a national and comparative perspective.

Gro-Anita Myklevold is currently a PhD student at the University of South-Eastern Norway. In her PhD project she investigates how the multilingual turn can be operationalized in language classrooms at the upper secondary school level in Norway, and how multilingualism as a phenomenon is perceived by students, teachers and teacher educators. In addition to multilingualism, her main research interests are English teaching and learning in general, and metafiction and metacognition in particular. She has previously co-edited the publications Fremmedspråksdidaktikk (Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2014) and Teaching and Learning English (Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2018), and she has published articles within metacognition (Bøhn & Myklevold, 2018), as well as in metafiction (Myklevold, 2014, 2017, 2019).

Asli Lidice Gokturk Saglam is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Languages and Literature Studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her post-doc project focuses on research literacy in pre-service teacher education in the Norwegian higher education context. Her other research interests cover language assessment and use of educational technology.

Delia Schipor is Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where she teaches English grammar, English didactics, and Multilingualism and culture. She has a doctoral degree on historical multilingualism from the University of Stavanger, and her current publications are focused on English didactics and the history of English. Her research interests include multilingualism, critical visual literacy, and national subject curriculum implementation.

Heike Speitz has been a professor of language education at the University of South-Eastern Norway since 2015. She has long experience from teaching and research at college and university level in several countries, and from teaching languages in upper-secondary schools in Norway. National and international research and development projects focus on curriculum development and language policies, an earlier start to foreign languages in school, and pluri-/multilingualism in languages education. As head of the languages section at Telemark Educational Research, she was involved in international projects with the Council of Europe, connected to the CEFR and the European Language Portfolio (ELP/PEL). Multilingualism, language learning, culture and identity are key words in her professional activities. For the past year, Heike Speitz has been the head of USN’s Ph.D. program in Culture Studies.