speakers

Frank Serafini is a Professor of Literacy Education and Children’s Literature at Arizona State University. Frank has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles in the field of literacy education, multimodality, and children’s literature. His latest book entitled Beyond the Visual: An Introduction to Researching Multimodal Phenomena was published in 2022. Frank has been an elementary classroom teacher, a literacy specialist, and an educational consultant for the past twenty-five years. Frank’s current research projects include visual andmultimodal research designs, the history of picturebooks, the instantiation of narrative in multimodal forms, and the complex relationship of words and images in children’s literature.

Sandra Schamroth Abrams is a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield and a researcher at the University of South Africa. Her research of digital literacies, videogaming, and technology integration reveals layered meaning making and agentive learning across digital and nondigital practices. Overall, Abrams’s work suggests that the nuances of digital worlds and practices can disrupt convention, promote social responsibility, and provide new avenues for pedagogical discovery. Forthcoming titles include Videogames, Libraries, and the Feedback Loop: Learning Beyond the Stacks (co-authored), An Integrated Mixed Methods Approach to Nonverbal Communication Data: A Practical Guide to Collection and Analysis in Online and Offline Spaces (co-authored), and Child-Parent Research Reimagined (co-edited). Abrams is a co-editor of the Gaming and Ecologies Series and an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches. 

Dr Carmen Herrero, is a Reader (Assistant Professor) in Hispanic Studies and one of the University Education Innovator Scholars at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). She leads the group Film, Languages and Media Education (FLAME), which is part of the Screen Studies Network. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Film in Language Teaching Association (FILTA), a professional  association of language teachers, film educators and researchers which provides a forum for the exchange of information and material related to the use of film in language teaching. Her research focuses on film, screen and transmedia studies and their pedagogical application to innovative approaches to language learning and teaching. She has co-edited four books in this interdisciplinary field:  Teaching Languages with Screen Media: Pedagogical Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2023); Rethinking Multimodal Literacy in Theory and Practice (Peter Lang, 2023); Visual Literacy and Digital Communication: The Role of Media in New Educational Practices (Comares, 2022); Using Film and Media in the Language Classroom (Multilingual Matters, 2019).

Janice Bland is Professor of English Education, Nord University, Norway. Her research interests are children’s literature from picturebooks to young adult fiction, creative writing, visual and critical literacy, English language and literature pedagogy, global issues, ecocriticism, interculturality and drama. Among her publications are two monographs and three edited volumes, and she is editor-in-chief of Children’s Literature in English Language Education (CLELEjournal).

Izaskun Elorza is a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Salamanca. She is co-lead of the MIAMUL Project (Children’s picture books about migration: Multimodal analysis and applicability to multicultural and multilingual environments), and lead of the Research Group ‘Linguistic Descriptions of English’ (LINDES) of the University of Salamanca. She is interested in exploring how the visual and the verbal semiotic resources are used to create representations of migrants and of migration in picture books from a systemic-functional perspective, and how this knowledge can be put at the service of improving multimodal literacy resources. Her research is based in a threefold perspective combining systemic functional linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, and corpus-assisted analysis. Recent work has been published in Linguistics and Education (2023).

Lindsey Moses is a Professor of Literacy and Program Coordinator of the Master of Arts in Literacy Education Program at Arizona State University. Lindsey’s research is grounded in supporting language, literacy, and positive identity development for children in elementary school. The majority of this work has been situated in multilingual educational contexts with a focus on collaborative and reciprocal research with classroom teachers. Lindsey is committed to research practices in which teachers’ and students’ voices are privileged.

Maria Papadopoulou is Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of Early Childhood Education. Her research interests include early literacy and language education. She has participated in more than twenty (20) research projects. She has been Head of the Postgraduate Program ‘Language Education for refugees and migrants’ at the Hellenic Open University, Greece. She has also developed resources for first and second-language learning. In 2019 she co-edited the special issue ‘Multimodality in Education’ for the Semiotic Journal ‘Punctum’. Her research interests focus on Literacy, Language education, Second language learning, Curriculum design, Visual Semiotics, and Multimodality. 

Elena Domínguez Romero is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). Her recent research interests include evidentiality and stance in media discourse, applied linguistics, and innovative teaching research. She currently co-leads a research project on stance strategies in discourse related to immigration and racism (RACISMMAFF, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER funds, reference PID2021-125327NB-I00). She has also participated in three other funded research projects on stance, evidentiality, and modality in European languages: EUROEVIDMOD (FFI2011-23181), EVIDISPRAG (FFI2015-65474-P), and STANCEDISC (PGC2018-095798-B-I00). Her involvement in teaching innovation projects is equally extensive. Elena Domínguez Romero is co-editor of the volumes Transformative Trends in Language Learning (Peter Lang, 2024), Rethinking Multimodal Literacy in Theory and Practice (Peter Lang, 2023), Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality: Conceptual and Descriptive Issues (Peter Lang 2023), Visual Literacy and Digital Communication (Comares, 2022), Teaching Literature and Language through Multimodal Texts (IGI Global, 2018), Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages (Peter Lang 2017), or Thinking Modally: English and Contrastive Studies on Modality (Cambridge Scholars 2015). 

Marta Carretero is Professor at the Complutense University, Madrid, where she lectures in semantics, pragmatics and functional linguistics. Her research concentrates on modality, evidentiality and appraisal in English or from a contrastive English-Spanish perspective, including approaches to theoretical issues and descriptive work on discourse types such as film reviews, financial discourse, opinion articles, and newspaper discourse on COVID-19 and migration. She also authors studies on concrete modal and evidential words and expressions, especially adverbs and nouns. She has published papers in Journal of Pragmatics, Functions of Language, Languages in Contrast, Word and Applied Corpus Linguistics, among other journals. She is co-editor of five books, including English Modality: Core, Periphery and Evidentiality (2013) and Evidentiality Revisited: Cognitive Grammar, Functional and Discourse-Pragmatic Perspectives (2017). She has continuously participated in research projects funded by Spanish ministries, and is currently co-director of the project titled Stance Strategies in Immigration and Racism-Related Discourse (RACISMMAFF).