University of Birmingham

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’.

University of Exeter

FRANCESCO GOGLIA is a senior lecturer in Italian at the University of Exeter, UK (Ph.D. in Linguistics). His research interests include multilingualism 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.

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.

Griffith University

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 Tetun. Coming from a teaching background, she has taught in secondary schools, adult migrant and higher education in the UK, 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)

The University of Melbourne

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.

Tilburg University

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.

JEANNE KURVERS has been working as a senior researcher and associate professor at 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.

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 how literacy is embedded in people’s culture and daily life in their multilingual communities. From 2003–2008 she 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 beginner level and ‘Iha Dalan’ for advanced level, written 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.

Universidade Nacional de Timor-Lorosa’e

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.