Our Team

I was born and raised in Berlin (Germany) where I started learning French and English at school. Consistently drawn to the unknown, I was given the opportunity to travel and to spend extended periods of my late teenage years in France and in Australia. Life with several languages became natural, and offered me the chance to explore different ways of connecting to people through different languages.

My fascination for linguistic and cultural diversity brought me to Quebec in 2006 for a pedagogical internship. Instead of returning to Germany to pursue a teaching career, I settled in Quebec City where I obtained a PhD in language didactics from Laval University.

In 2015, I was appointed Assistant Professor at the Departmentof Modern Languages of the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières (UQTR, Canada), and recently tenured. My research interests include psycholinguistic processes in the acquisition of additional languages, specifically with regards to the development of metalinguistic and crosslinguistic awareness in instructed settings.

Throughout my academic career, I have experienced great difficulty in learning additional languages, more specifically English. That's why I decided to dedicate my professional career to it, in order to better understand the factors influencing acquisition, as well as the interface between research and practice.  

Originally from La Mauricie, I studied at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, where I obtained an undergraduate degree in second language teaching, with a specialization in English and Spanish. For the love of Spanish and its culture, I continued my studies at the University of Alicante (Spain), with a master's degree in second/foreign language pedagogy, followed by a doctorate in additional language acquisition. After spending a year in Mexico at the University of Guanajuato and four years in Texas at the University of Texas at Tyler, I joined the Didactics Department at the Université de Montréal. My research interests focus on additional languages teaching and learning, particularly regarding the influence of other known languages on the acquisition of grammar. I am also working on various projects in crosslinguistic pedagogy and task-based language teaching. 

During my undergraduate studies in Music at Université de Montréal (Canada), I realized how passionate I was about languages. I thus decided to undertake another bachelor degree, in Translation, at University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières (UQTR, Canada). I now take part in various research projects on instructed second language acquisition where I can use my language and computer science skills, as with the Pluri-L AppEALS Laboratory.

After undergraduate studies in business in England, I set off to work in Asia as an English teacher. My first months teaching consisted of translations of French verb tables in my head to help me tell students what verbs and tenses were in English. Clearly I was ill-equipped. Thankfully I was accepted to do a master’s at Concordia University (Montreal) in applied linguistics. This was the start of my career in applied linguistics and second language education. Today, I am an associate professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal in the Department of Language Education.

My general research interests focus on additional (second) language education. My specific interests relate to the learning and teaching of grammar and literacy, conceptualised broadly to be critical, multimodal, plurilingual, academic, etc. I work within a plurilingual framework – our language repertoire is not unilingual even if our classrooms remain stubbornly so. This framework permits the promotion of all our linguistic experiences to help language development whilst also allowing for the development of knowledge in terms of the implicit and explicit roles of additional language education with respect to equity, diversity and inclusion.

With a university degree "Master of Education" from the University of Paderborn (Germany) in Fine Arts and French (August 2019), as well as the previous Bachelor's degree in the same disciplines (June 2016), I have a total of 7 years of experience in more than three different disciplines with a focus on educational psychology. Through my different areas of study, my open and interdisciplinary approach to learning is a fruitful direction in various research projects. Imagining new (digital) tools and experiences to create an innovative dialogue with learners has been a main focus of my academic research.
In order to promote interdisciplinary learning, I conducted a scientific research, as part of my undergraduate thesis, aiming to define and recommend lines of intervention for the use of tablets in classrooms. In the AppEL Pluri-L Lab, I design strategies to communicate research activities to a wider audience.

I first attended Université de Montréal (Canada), where I obtained a bachelor degree in History before entering the undergraduate program in Teaching English as a Second Language at University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières (UQTR, Canada). I am now about to begin graduate studies in Education at UQTR, with a particular focus on the role of play in learning additional languages. Because crosslinguistic pedagogy has been such an important part of my own experience of learning and teaching new languages, I really wanted to join the Pluri-L AppEALS research laboratory.

I am a PhD student preparing a co-supervision thesis in Education from University of Quebec in Montréal (UQÀM, Canada) and Language Science Linguistics from Université des Antilles (Guadeloupe). My research topics are bilingualism in context of diglossia, and additional language acquisition processes. I am also a teacher of English as a Second/Foreign Language.

I developed my early interest in languages through numerous travels and academic exchange programs (USA, Morocco). As my first doctoral internship, I join thePluri-L AppEALS research laboratory. My objective is to devise a procedure for collecting and analyzing qualitative data, in the context of an action research targeting the implementation of a crosslinguistic-communicative teaching model.

I am an undergraduate student in Second Language Teaching at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (Canada). My travels and more specifically my foreign teaching work experience (in England and Colombia) are at the root of my interest for the English, Spanish and, more recently, German language. Beginning with a CEGEP education in literature, I obtained a first bachelor’s degree in History of Art before coming back to my first love with a DESS (advanced graduate diploma) in Translation and Terminology and a Spanish language minor (Université Laval, Canada). Because the multilingual approach in language teaching is a precious tool to me as a learner and as a teacher, I am pleased to contribute to Pluri-L AppEALS by transcribing interviews and analyzing data.

Having grown up in a small town in Southern Brazil where several languages coexisted due to immigration (Italian, Polish, German) and colonization (Portuguese), I have always been passionate about language plurality as well as subjective and cultural displacement/shifting resulting both from immigration and languages in contact. As a teenager, this passion drove me to learn English and French and, later Polish, Italian and Spanish.

Developed at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), my PhD research focused on the appropriation of French as a foreign language in a teaching-learning context. Among other aspects, I was interested in the analogical processes put in place by Portuguese speakers while learning French and the enhancement of these processes as teaching strategies.

At the Pluri-L AppEALS Laboratory, I take part in the development of multilingual teaching materials (French, English and Brazilian Portuguese) and I also have the opportunity to contribute to theoretical reflections regarding crosslinguistic pedagogy.

Always wanting a career that would afford me many occasions to travel and learn more about different cultures, I trained and worked for several years as a seaman. During one of my travels, I fell in love with the Portuguese language and felt a new calling. I registered to Laval University (Canada) and obtained in 2012 a bachelor’s degree in Translation (English-French) and a certificate in Portuguese Studies. In 2015, I completed a master’s degree in Linguistics with a focus on crosslinguistic semantic influence. Since then, I have been working on various research projects that examine different aspects of language and language use. My role within the Pluri-L AppEALS Laboratory is the management of internal affairs and public relations.

After completing a musical theatre training in Montreal, I had an international career for about 15 years overseas. Since I have learned English while on my first contract, language learning has fascinated me. I am currently a bachelor's student in second language teaching at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. I am very grateful to be part of the AppEL Pluri-L Laboratory team and to deepen my knowledge of the plurilingual approach.

I am a PhD student in Education at the Department of Language Didactics at the University of Quebec in Montréal (UQÀM, Canada), from which I also received a master’s degree in Language Didactics and a bachelor degree in Linguistics-Languages (German, Spanish). My main research interests within the field of Second/Foreign Language Pedagogy concern pronunciation, technology integration and task-based language teaching. I joined the Pluri-L AppEALS team as part of my second doctoral internship. During my internship, I devised a design of research and development to direct further research in crosslinguistic pedagogy, and conducted the first steps of this iterative process.

I am a pre-med Spanish major minoring in Biochemistry and Chemistry at the University of Texas at Tyler. I currently speak English and Spanish and am learning French and Italian. I have always seen language as a bridge to connect people of different cultures. I feel with each language we learn we open our minds to see the world from a unique perspective, allowing us to grow immensely. Because of this, I am excited to work on the projects of Pluri-L AppEALS to explore new ways to improve language learning. I look forward to using my exposure to language and the culture that each language supports throughout my career in medicine.

Hola! I’m an undergraduate political science student at the University of Texas at Tyler (USA). I believe language can be a tool for empathy in the world. I grew up in a bilingual household, but my love of international music and culture led me to begin studying Korean when I was 18 and eventually led me to take French here at UT Tyler. My role in the projects of Pluri-L AppEALS is to transcribe audio recordings, and I’m excited to bring something valuable to this project.

I am a doctoral student in education at the Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada). My work focuses on feedback for learning in higher education and more specifically on the development of teachers' feedback skills in an online training context. I did my first doctoral internship in the AppEL Pluri-L Laboratory from May to December 2021 for a duration of 135 hours. This allowed me to participate in the first phase of the crosslinguistic-communicative teaching model implementation process in German courses in Quebec and French courses in Texas. I collaborated in the design, implementation, and delivery of virtual training sessions for foreign language (FL) teachers as well as in the design and implementation of data collection instruments. In order to document the training and the model implementation process, I also conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of two training sessions, in an action research-training approach.