20 – 21 February 2015, University of Exeter

List of participants’ biographies

1. SUSANA AFONSO is a lecturer in Portuguese at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are in cognitive-typological linguistics (including construction grammar), language variation, contact and change, particularly in relation to varieties of Portuguese. Her Ph.D. was on impersonal constructions in Portuguese from a construction grammar perspective. Recently, Susana has focused on language contact in immigrant communities and she has studied patterns of multilingualism among the East Timorese community in Portugal. She is currently preparing to collect data among the East Timorese in Peterborough, UK with Francesco Goglia. Susana is also particularly interested in language policy in East Timor and its impact on the potential formation of an East Timorese variety of Portuguese. She has a keen interest in using empirical methodologies, especially corpora. She a native speaker of Portuguese and also speaks English, Spanish and Danish.
2. HANNA JAKUBOWICZ BATORÉO completed her university studies in Poland (University of Warsaw) and Portugal (University of Lisbon). She has a background in Portuguese linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Her Ph.D. thesis (1997) explored the expression of space in European Portuguese from linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective, and her subsequent research (2006) focused on narrative discourse of East Timorese teachers of Portuguese as L2 in the first years after East Timor’s independence. She has focused her Timorese research interests on language contact and formation of an emergent variety of Portuguese, from a pluricentric language perspective. Hanna is currently Professor of language acquisition and cognitive linguistics at Universidade Aberta, Lisbon, and member of a directory board at the Doctoral Programme of Portuguese Studies and the Post-graduate Programme of Portuguese as L2 (Português Língua Não-Materna). She is also a researcher at CLUNL (Universidade Nova, Lisbon).
3. DANIELLE BOON recently completed her doctorate at Tilburg University, Netherlands.  Her research (2009-2014) explores adult literacy education, acquisition and use in East Timor and looks into how literacy is embedded in people’s culture and daily life in their multilingual communities. From 2003–2008she was an adult literacy advisor to the Minister of Education in East Timor, through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). She was involved in designing and implementing the national adult/adolescent literacy programme with the manuals ‘Hakat ba Oin’ for beginners and ‘Iha Dalan’ for advanced level, in Tetum (also made available in Portuguese). With stakeholders she carried out regular teacher training sessions with 300 literacy teachers and realised capacity building of Ministry staff. Danielle has also been a senior policy advisor to the Dutch Ministry of Justice, on the linguistic and cultural integration of immigrants. She speaks Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, German and (some) Tetum
4. ESTÊVÃO CABRAL has a Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from Lancaster University, UK. He has done research on the political history of East Timor, on literacy during the years of Resistance to the Indonesian invasion and occupation and on language policy in East Timor. His publications reflect these research interests. In 2004, he was awarded a British Academy grant to conduct postdoctoral fieldwork in East Timor. From 2009–2012, he was a researcher on a Dutch research project, at Tilburg University, Netherlands, entitled: ‘Becoming a nation of readers in East-Timor: Language policy and adult literacy development in a multilingual context’. The project was funded by the Dutch Science Foundation.
5. EDEGAR DA CONCEIÇÃO SAVIO is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Culture Studies in the School of Humanities at Tilburg University within the project ‘Becoming a Nation of Readers in Timor-Leste: Language policy and adult literacy development in a multilingual context’, funded by the Netherlands Research Organisation (NWO-WOTRO) and more specifically focused on a sociolinguistic study of Fataluku in Lautém. He has written a first draft of his PhD thesis and the defense is expected to take place in spring 2015 at the University of Leiden. He speaks Fataluku, Indonesian, Tetun and English. From 2003-2009, he worked as a Senior lecturer at the University of Dili, Timor-Leste, Faculty of Social Science & Humanities, Department International Relations. From 2005- January 2006, he was a member of the sub-commission at the Ministry of Education, Higher Education, for the International Relations Department, Dili, Timor-Leste. He has a Masters of Social Sciences & International Relations (2002) from the Parahyangan Catholic University Bandung-Indonesia, thesis: ‘Hegemonic United Nations transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET’s) in conflict resolution in East Timor 1999-2002’.
6. BENJAMIM DE ARAÚJO E CÔRTE-REAL is Director-General of the National Institute of Linguistics at the National University of East Timor. The title of his Ph.D. thesis was: ‘Mambai and its Verbal Art Genre: A Cultural Reflection on Suru-Ainaro, Timor-Leste’. From 1990–1999, he was a lecturer in English at Universitas Timor Timur. This was during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. From 1999–2001, he was a co-ordinator and member of the Commission of the Caritas Sweden Education Project in East Timor and he worked with the dioceses of Díli and Baucau. From 2001–2010, he served as Rector of the National University of East Timor. He speaks Mambai, Tetum, Portuguese, Indonesian and English.
7. ILDEGRADA DA COSTA CABRAL is a doctoral researcher based in the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism at the University of Birmingham. She is now in her 4^thand final year of study and is writing up her thesis. Her research interests lie in the ways language policies in multilingual countries are translated into classroom practice, ways that teachers understand and respond to language policy changes, ideologies shaping language-in-education, and ways in which communication between teachers and learners in classrooms is shaped by the use of two languages. Her current study focuses on language policy and classroom practices in East Timor. She combines ethnography with close analysis of classroom discourse and interviews with policymakers.
8. AONE VAN ENGELENHOVEN holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Leiden University where he now lecturers Southeast Asian Linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and the School of Asian Studies at the Leiden Institute of Areal Studies. His research focuses on linguistic anthropology in insular Southeast Asia (specifically in East Indonesia and East Timor, and among Moluccan migrants in The Netherlands) with special emphasis on orality and verbal folklore. Beside that he has written extensively on diachronic and descriptive issues in several languages in East Indonesia and East Timor. Aone is affiliated to the Asosiasi Tradisi Lisan in Indonesia. Aone’s main languages are Indonesian, Dutch, English, Tetum and Leti. He was involved in several international research projects on East Timor, the latest one being Becoming a nation of readers in East Timor: Language policy and adult literacy development in a multilingual context, lodged at Tilburg University.
9. ZUZANA GREKSÁKOVÁ holds a Master’s degree in Translation Studies and Interpreting (English and Portuguese) from the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. After graduating, Zuzana attended a year-long course on the Indonesian language at the University of Udayana in Denpasar, Indonesia as a Darmsiswa scholarship student.  Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in Portuguese linguistics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.  Her research focuses on the development of Tetun Prasa, an Austronesian language spoken in Timor-Leste, and its contact with varieties of (Creole) Portuguese and Malay/Indonesian as part of the sociolinguistic history of the island of Timor.  She is an FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) research fellow at Centro de Estudos de Linguística Geral e Aplicada da Universidade de Coimbra.
10. FRANCESCO GOGLIA is a senior lecturer in Italian at the University of Exeter, UK (Ph.D. in Linguistics). His research interests includemultilingualism and language contact in immigrant and diasporic communities in Italy, UK, Portugal and Australia. He has recently completed and submitted the manuscript of a monograph ‘Language Contact in the immigrant context: The case of Igbo-Nigerians in Italy’ for the completion of which he was awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship. In 2012, Francesco collaborated with Susana Afonso on a project entitled: ‘Patterns of multilingualism among different generations of the East-Timorese diasporic community in Portugal’. He is currently collecting data among the East Timorese in Melbourne and Darwin with John Hajek, and getting started with data collection in Peterborough, UK with Susana Afonso. Francesco is a native speaker of Italian and speaks English and Spanish.
11. JOHN HAJEK completed his university studies in Australia, Italy and the UK. He has a background in Romance languages, general linguistics, phonetics, phonology and sociolinguistics. He speaks six languages. John is currently Professor of Italian and director of the Research Unit for Multilingualism and Cross-cultural Communication (RUMACCC) at the University of Melbourne. In addition, he is president of the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities. He has a wide range of research interests but through his work in particular with RUMACCC he has worked extensively on languages education, language maintenance and literacy development. He is a keen supporter of early literacy in mother tongue, as well as the preservation of smaller languages in East Timor and elsewhere. He has worked extensively on the languages of East Timor including Waima’a, Baikenu and Galolen (including literacy material development). He has also co-written a grammar of Tetum Dili and written a number of articles and book chapters on Tetum and other Timorese languages.
12. JOHN HOLM wrote his doctoral dissertation on the creole English of Nicaragua at University College London in 1978, then taught at the College of the Bahamas until 1980 and at the City University of New York until 1998, when he accepted the chair of English linguistics at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. John is the author Pidgins and Creoles (1988 – 89) and Languages in contact: the partial restructuring of vernaculars (2004), all published by Cambridge University Press.  He is a founding member of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics and of the Associação: Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola.  He is currently coordinating an international research project on Non-European Structures in Overseas Portuguese funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. He speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, German and French, and he understands a number of related languages.
13. JULIETTE HUBER currently holds a fixed-term position as a visiting assistant professor in linguistics at the University of Regensburg (Germany). Educated at the Universities of Zurich (Switzerland) and Leiden (Netherlands), her research has focused on Makalero, the smallest of the Papuan languages of Timor. Her PhD dissertation is a descriptive grammar of that language, and she has since published and presented on various grammatical and semantic properties of Makalero. She has also conducted fieldwork on and published a sketch grammar of the closely related Makasae language. Her research interests are (morpho) syntax, language typology, historical linguistics (including how language can inform our understanding of a region’s prehistory), and the way spatial relations and landscape are encoded in different languages. A native speaker of Swiss German, Juliette also speaks English, French, Polish, Indonesian, and some Makalero and Portuguese.
14. SJAAK KROON has a Ph.D. from Nijmegen University in Sociolinguistics and Language Education. He currently holds the chair of ‘Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society’ at the Tilburg University School of Humanities where he is Head of the Department of Culture Studies. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Beijing Language and Culture University. Sjaak’s main languages are Dutch, a Dutch dialect, English and German. His research interests are in language diversity, language policy and education in the context of globalisation and superdiversity, using ethnography as a main research perspective. Sjaak has been involved in larger sociolinguistic projects in the Russian Federation, Eritrea and Suriname, as well as in the European Hera project ‘Investigating discourses of inheritance and identity’. His work in East Timor is connected to the research project ‘Becoming a nation of readers in East Timor: Language policy and adult literacy development in a multilingual context’ funded by the Dutch Science Foundation.
15. JEANNE KURVERS has been working as a senior researcher and associate professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Tilburg University, Netherlands. She has been involved in several studies on the acquisition and teaching of (second language) literacy of children or adults in the Netherlands, Eritrea, and East Timor, on integration programs for migrants and on family literacy. Her PhD focused on the impact of literacy on the knowledge of language and writing. She has written books and several articles related to adult second language literacy acquisition, been involved in the development of teaching materials and in professional development of literacy teachers; and editing a journal for literacy teaching of adults. Since 2005, she has been participating in the international LESLLA group that focuses on research, policy and practice regarding second language and literacy acquisition of unschooled and low-educated adults.
16. MARILYN MARTIN-JONES is an Emeritus Professor based at the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism at the University of Birmingham. She was the founding Director of the MOSAIC Centre (2007—2010). Over the last 30 years or so, she has been involved in research on multilingualism in classroom and community contexts in England and in Wales. She has a particular interest in the ways in which language and literacy practices contribute to the construction of identities, in local life worlds and in educational settings, and with the ways in which such practices are bound up with local and global relations of power. Her work is critical and ethnographic in nature, combining participant observation and ethnographic interviews with analysis of multilingual discourse and literacy practices. These theoretical and methodological concerns are reflected in her publications and in her book series with Routledge entitled: ‘Critical Studies in Multilingualism’.
17. KERRY TAYLOR-LEECH lectures in Applied Linguistics and second language teaching at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. She speaks English, Portuguese and French, some Spanish and some Tetum. Coming from a teaching background, she has taught in secondary schools, adult migrant and higher education in theUK, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Kerry’s research is primarily ethnographic and explores language policy, development, identity, education and literacy in multilingual contexts. She also researches the relationship between language and settlement for adult immigrants. She recently co-edited a thematic issue of ‘Current Issues in Language Planning’ Journal on language planning and multilingual education.  Her Ph.D. thesis explored the role of language policy development in the discursive construction of national identity in East Timor and her subsequent research in East Timor has focused on linguistic landscape and language-in-education policy. She has been part of several missions that have contributed to the development of the mother tongue-based multilingual education policy and she has followed and written about the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Pilot Project (MTB-MLEPP).
18. CATHARINA WILLIAMS-VAN KLINKEN lives in Dili with her agriculturalist husband Rob Williams. Her initial exposure to the island of Timor came through fieldwork for a PhD from the Australian National University for a grammar of Tetun Terik. In 1999 she was an electoral officer for the East Timorese referendum on independence, after which she shifted her language study and writing to Tetun Dili. Since 2002 she has spent most of her time trying to apply linguistics in practice. This includes a half-time position as director of language studies at Dili Institute of Technology, overseeing departments teaching Tetun, English and Portuguese, and developing materials for teaching Tetun. The other half time is devoted to working on a common language translation of the New Testament into Tetun Dili. Her research interests include following the rapid changes in Tetun Dili since independence.
19. CAMILLA ZWACK completed her BA (Hons) in Linguistics and South East Asian Studies in 2011 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She then completed her MA in Language Documentation and Description (Field Linguistics pathway) in 2013 at the same institution. Camilla became interested in the languages of Timor-Leste when she started visiting the country in 2009. She therefore decided to conduct research with an East Timorese diaspora for her Master’s dissertation. Camilla has been living and working in Timor-Leste since March 2014. Her interests include minority and endangered languages, language in the context of development, historical linguistics, language policy and planning, and language support and revitalisation.