Guest Speakers

DR. MELINA PORTO 
(La Plata University – Argentina)

                                              

Melina Porto has the degrees of Teacher and Translator of English from Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) in Argentina. She is a researcher at CONICET, full Professor in English Language II at UNLP and has been a Visiting Academic at the University of East Anglia in England since 2012. She holds an MA ELT from the University of Essex, UK, with the thesis supervised by Prof. Henry Widdowson, and a PhD in Sciences of Education from UNLP (thesis supervised by Prof. Michael Byram). She has published articles in several international journals and serves on several Editorial Advisory Boards. She has been an International Research Correspondent for Reading Research Quarterly, a member of the Publications and Language Diversity Committees of the International Literacy Association (ILA) and has reviewed for its Grants and Research Committee. Research interests: the intercultural dimension of English language teaching and intercultural citizenship education in the foreign language classroom.

PROFESSOR ANASTASIA BOLDIREFF

Anastasia Boldireff teaches at the Universidad Externado in Bogota, Colombia in the Law Department and is an Academic Consultant with MacMillan Publishers.  She received her Honors Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing from York University, Toronto followed by her Masters of Arts in Literature from the University of Toronto.  Additionally, she holds her TESL Diploma in ESL teaching and a diploma in Latin-English Translation from the Toronto School of Theology.  She has taught in Canada, Northern Ireland and Colombia.  Ms. Boldireff also engages with human rights causes by volunteering her time to online organizations and local foundations.  She is a teacher, a researcher, a writer and an activist.  

DR. NORMA BARLETTA 
(Universidad del Norte - Barranquilla)

Norma Barletta holds a Ph.D. degree in Second Language  Acquisition and Teaching and an MA in Education. She is an associate professor of the Spanish Department at Universidad del Norte and a member of the Language and Education research group.  She does research in the field of first and second language teaching and discourse analysis, and is especially interested in Systemic Functional Linguistics.  Within this tradition, learning the mother tongue is learning how to mean  Thus, the challenge for FL education would be learning how to mean In L2, broadly speaking, moving from grammar –based approaches to context-based ones.

MARIA CLAUDIA NIETO CRUZ 

(Universidad Nacional de Colombia)

Maria Claudia Nieto, Master in ESP (English for Specific Purposes), Warwick University, England. Professor Nieto has developed her professional career in English for specific purposes, English for general purposes, and teacher education for pre and in service teachers. She is an associate professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Bogotá. She is also a co-researcher of the groups PROFILE (Profesores de Inglés Lengua Extranjera) and LEXI (Lenguas Extranjeras e Investigación), both from the Foreign Languages Department, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Bogotá.  e-mail:  mcnietoc@unal.edu.co