Team

Dr Helena Roquet is the director of the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona, where she is a lecturer of Foreign Language Acquisition at both graduate and postgraduate levels. She is also currently an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where she also teaches at both graduate and postgraduate levels. She completed her PhD in Second Language Acquisition at the UPF and defended her doctoral thesis, The Acquisition of English as a Foreign Language: Integrating Content and Language in Mainstream Education, in July 2011. Her PhD dissertation recently earned her an Extraordinary Doctorate Award. Helena is also a member of the consolidated research group ALLENCAM (Language Acquisition from Multilingual Catalonia) at the UPF and has participated in several research projects funded at national levels. Her main research interests lie within the fields of Second and Third Language Acquisition, bilingualism, CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education).

Selected publications

Martyn Baker has been a teacher in the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona since 1999, working in the faculties of Humanities, Communication Sciences, Economic and Social Sciences. He has also collaborated on outreach projects such as a publishing project with Santillana and the preparation of official English language exams. He has been teaching English since 1987, obtained the DELTA in 1992 and currently also teaches at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) on Tecnocampus Mataró. He has also taught English Literature in the UNED (Terrassa), on intensive courses at the Escola Oficial d’Idiomes (EOI) for over 20 years and has experience as an examiner for the Cambridge FCE exam..

Suzanne Córdova has specialised in teaching English in the faculties of Economic and Social Sciences and Law at UIC Barcelona since 2010. She has also collaborated on outreach programs such as a translation project with Santillana and the proctoring of official English language exams. She has taught English for Specific Purposes for more than 17 years and has also worked as a freelance translator for 15 years. She teaches at the North American Institute and has taught online at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). She has a postgraduate degree in Spanish-English translation in addition to experience in the engineering and manufacturing industries. 

Dr Natalia Evnitskaya is part of the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona, where she teaches at both graduate and postgraduate levels, mainly in the fields of English for Specific Purposes, EFL and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). She has almost 10 years’ experience in teaching at university level. She holds a BA in English Studies (2003) from the University of Saint-Tikhon of Moscow and an MA (2008) and PhD (2012), both in Teaching Language and Literature, from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Recently, her PhD dissertation was recognised with an Extraordinary Doctorate Award. Between 2012 and 2016 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). Natalia is a member of the LED (Language and Education) Research Group (UAB) and the UAM-CLIL Research Group (UAM). She has participated in seven research projects funded at regional and national levels and collaborated in the organisation of a number of conferences on CLIL. Her main research interests are bilingualism, CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), classroom interaction, multimodality, EFL / CLIL teacher education, conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics.

Selected publications

Dr Janine Knight is part of the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona, where she is a teacher and teacher trainer working with students in the Faculty of Education. She has had over 20 years' experience in teaching and management within primary, secondary school, further and higher education sectors with respect to first and second language development (literacy and additional language learning). In previous roles she has been a head of department for literacy and language at a Further Education college, co-ordinated cross-institutional learning support and supervised internal inspections of the language provision for young people and adults in community centres and the prison sector. She earned a PhD from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) with a thesis on developing spoken interaction skills online. She is interested in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), plurilingual approaches to learning and using a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach in university classes.

Selected publications

Doris Stanger has been a teacher in the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona since 2009. She normally teaches in the faculties of Communication Sciences and Economic and Social Sciences. She has also collaborated on outreach projects such as a publishing project with Santillana and the preparation of official English language exams. She has over 20 years’ experience in teaching English as a foreign language and has taught in the North American Institute and online at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). She is currently completing a Master’s Degree in E-Learning / ICT at the UOC.

Jean Vilanova is co-founder of the Language Service, a department which has evolved into the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona. She worked as director and subdirector of the Language Service for a number of years. She has also been a programme coordinator and carried out teaching and syllabus design tasks in the different degree programmes. Jean also spent time working at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, teaching on a series of English language programmes for international students, a foundation course for overseas students wishing to enrol in Australian universities and a government English language migrant programme. She currently teaches at degree and master’s level and is head of language services at UIC Barcelona.

Esteve Valls holds a PhD in Catalan Language and Literature from the University of Barcelona and is currently head of the Catalan Office and assistant director of the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona. He is also an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Linguistic and Literary Education at the University of Barcelona, having previously worked in the Department of Catalan Language and Literature at this university and on the Barcelona Campus of the UNED. His main lines of research include language variation and change in dialectical varieties of Catalan and the impact of borders and regional language policies on the phonetic, phonological, morphological and lexical evolution of these varieties. He performs research as a member of the project Fenòmens d’interfície fonètica-fonologia-morfologia des de la perspectiva de la variació lingüística [Phonetics, phonology and morphology interface phenomena from the perspective of linguistic variation] and the consolidated research group Study Group on Variation (GEV). He was also awarded the 4th Joan Veny Research Grant from the Ramon Muntaner Institute for his project La incidència de l’efecte frontera en l’autonomització de la llengua a la cruïlla catalanoaragonesa [The impact of the border effect on the autonomisation of the language at the border between Catalonia and Aragon] and has received other distinctions such as the Francesc de Borja Moll Dialectology Award from the Institute for Catalan Studies.

Selected publications

Anna Girmé Soler holds a degree in Catalan Language and Literature and a Postgraduate Degree in Language Consultancy and Editorial Services from the University of Barcelona. She has worked both in cultural affairs and language consulting and text editing for publishing companies and media. She joined the Catalan Unit as a Catalan and Spanish language specialist in 2017.

Laia Rosàs Redondo holds an undergraduate degree and PhD in Catalan Language and Literature from the University of Barcelona. She has worked as a language consultant and has taught Catalan to adults (Consorci per a la Normalització Lingüística, CIEE Barcelona Study Center, University of Barcelona). She also has experience in sociocultural promotion and as a Spanish teacher in Portland, Oregon (USA). Her collaboration with UIC Barcelona began in 2011, and since 2016 she has worked as a language specialist at the Catalan Office of the Institute for Multilingualism, where she is involved in teaching and sociocultural and linguistic promotion activities.

Bàrbara Serra Viñals holds a degree in Catalan Language and Literature and a Master’s degree in Language Consultancy, Editorial Services and Multilingual Management from the University of Barcelona. She has worked on the second edition of the Diccionari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans and took part in the Diccionari del Català Contemporani project at Institut d’Estudis Catalans (from 2000 to 2006). She has also taught Catalan and Spanish as a foreign language in England and the United States, from 2006 to 2009). She has been working as a Catalan and Spanish language specialist at the Catalan Office since 2011.

Mhairi Fiona Bain holds a Master’s degree in Translation Theory and Intercultural Studies from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), a Postgraduate degree in Conference Interpreting and Translating from Heriot-Watt University (UK) and an undergraduate degree in Hispanic Studies from the University of Aberdeen (UK). She is one of the authors of the Interuniversity Style Guide for Writing Institutional Texts in English [Manual d’estil interuniversitari per a la redacció de textos institucionals en anglès] written within the Catalan university context for the Xarxa Vives d’Universitats. She is currently participating in two interuniversity Xarxa Vives projects. Since 2013 she has been actively involved in Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET), a professional association for translators working mainly into English from Mediterranean languages (as secretary of the association from 2014 to 2016). She has been working at UIC Barcelona as an English language specialist since February 2011.

Anna Navarro Cañet holds an undergraduate degree in Law from the University of Girona, a postgraduate degree in Legal Translation from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a diploma in International Relations and European Integration (UAB). She has been a member of the team since 2009 and academic officer at the Institute for Multilingualism since its creation in 2015.

Monica Clua joined UIC Barcelona in 2011 as a full-time teacher with the Institute for Multilingualism and is based exclusively at the Sant Cugat Campus. Her teaching includes discourse analysis and professional communication in research in the Medicine, Nursing, Physiotherapy and Dentistry undergraduate programmes. She is a graduate in health sciences and began a Bachelor's of Science Degree with The Open University UK in 2009, until her interests turned to Content and Language Integrated Learning in Higher Education (ICHLE), in which she combines her knowledge and experience as a health professional and language specialist. She recently completed her Master’s Degree in Education Research in Language and Literature at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) with a thesis that explored embodied multimodality as a meaning-making system in the context of English as an academic lingua franca. She has recently started her PhD, which will build on her MA dissertation to further explore notions of meaning construction through embodied semiotic resources in the context of a multilingual university setting.

Selected publications

Dr Mandy Deal is assistant director of the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona and head of the Third Languages Unit on the Sant Cugat Campus. She has taught in the area of multilingual higher education since 1989 and is a specialist in Content and Language Integrated Learning in Higher Education (ICLHE). She joined UIC Barcelona in 1999 and has developed and taught ICLHE-based courses mainly on the health sciences campus. During this time she has collaborated with other departments on interdisciplinary projects. Dr Deal holds an undergraduate degree in French and German, a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics and a PhD in Teaching in Language and Literature. Her current research focus is in student-to-student collaborative learning in a multilingual higher education setting. She is a member of the Research Group on Plurilingual Interaction and Teaching (GREIP). Her recent projects have included a research stay at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and also active participation in the interuniversity collaboration to develop the Examen de Capacitació per a la Docència en Anglès per al personal acadèmic de les universitats catalanes (the Qualification Exam for Teaching in English for Faculty of Catalan Universities).

Selected publications

Yağmur Elif Met joined UIC Barcelona in early 2019 and currently works in the Institute for Multilingualism as a part-time lecturer of English for Specific Purposes on the Sant Cugat Campus. She is also pursuing a PhD in Communication, Education and Humanities at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC Barcelona), under the supervision of Dr Helena Roquet and Dr Júlia Barón. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English Language Teaching from Maltepe University (Turkey) and a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics and Language Acquisition in Multilingual Contexts from the University of Barcelona. Before joining UIC Barcelona, she taught English to students of various ages and levels both in Turkey and in Spain for over 7 years. Her main areas of interest are the acquisition of English as a foreign language, particularly individual differences (IDs) that are prominent features of Second Language Acquisition, and the effects of these variables on the learning process and outcomes, and finally methodological reflections on foreign language instruction in relation to these learner differences.

Selected publications

• Met, Y.E. (2018). The relationship between language aptitude, working memory capacity, motivation and L2 Spanish proficiency of adult learners in an immersion context. Master’s dissertation supervised by Dr Carmen Muñoz and Dr Maria del Mar Suárez. University of Barcelona.

Noelia Navarro is currently pursuing her PhD in Corpus Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM); her PhD thesis is co-supervised by Dr Helena Roquet Pugès (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, UPF, and UIC Barcelona). Her research explores the effect of CLIL methodology on English Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ written discourse through a contrastive interlanguage approach and corpus analysis. Before starting her PhD studies, she obtained an undergraduate degree in English Language and Linguistics from UCM and a Master’s Degree in Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language from the UPF. She has a Master’s Degree in Professional Communication from the INSA Business School (Barcelona). She currently works in the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona, where she is a part-time lecturer of Professional Communication. In the past, she taught academic writing to undergraduate students at Maastricht University (UM), CLIL to secondary school teachers at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and English as a foreign language at secondary school and university level in Spain. Her main areas of interest are CLIL, Discourse Analysis (especially Academic Writing) and Computer Learner Corpora.

Selected publications

Marta Segura is a predoctoral fellow at UIC Barcelona, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication, Education and Humanities. Her thesis, co-directed by Dr Helena Roquet and Dr Júlia Barón, focuses on the acquisition of English as a foreign language through Content-Based Instruction in pre-primary education. Before starting her PhD studies, Marta graduated with a degree in Translation and Interpretation from the UPF, where she specialised in legal and administration translation from English and French. She also completed a Master’s Degree in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (UPF), with a dissertation on the effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in primary and secondary education. She later completed the Master’s Degree in Teaching Training in Secondary School Education, with a specialisation in English (UB).

Wendi Smallwood has been an English teacher in the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona since 2012. She graduated as an English teacher from the University of Victoria (Canada), in 1995 and completed a master’s course in TESOL at Hanyang University (South Korea) in 2005. She has taught English as a second language, as a foreign language and for specific purposes internationally in Canada, Japan, South Korea and Spain. She has been an official IELTS examiner for both the writing and speaking sections and has also collaborated on outreach projects such as a publishing project with Santillana.