Note: This blog post was also published at Swansea University's Applied Linguistics and TESOL blog. You can read the original English here: https://english-language-tesol.swansea.ac.uk/2026/06/16/my-internship-with-bilingualism-matters-by-daniel-strogen/, or the Cymraeg here: https://english-language-tesol.swansea.ac.uk/cy/2026/06/16/fy-interniaeth-gyda-bilingualism-matters-gan-daniel-strogen/.

Daniel Strogen is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate and senior teaching assistant in Applied Linguistics at Swansea University. His doctoral research examines Welsh language use among young people, with a particular focus on post-school transitions and the factors shaping continued use or disengagement. Over the past several months he has been working as an intern with Bilingualism Matters. The findings of the internship are presented in a report on bilingualism and multilingualism research at Swansea University, available here: https://shorturl.at/qjn3G. 

Over the past several months, I have had the pleasure of working with Bilingualism Matters @ Abertawe/Swansea on an internship examining the wide range of expertise relating to bilingualism and multilingualism across Swansea University. What began as an exercise in institutional mapping grew to encompass a much wider set of questions about language research and its place within the university. As part of the internship, I undertook a series of informal interviews with researchers and professional services staff from across the institution. These conversations involved colleagues working in areas including Welsh language education, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, multilingualism, cognition, identity, and public policy. For someone whose own research focusses upon Welsh language use and policy, the experience proved especially valuable. It offered an opportunity to encounter perspectives and forms of scholarship beyond the boundaries of my own thesis, while also revealing the remarkable breadth of work relating to language already taking place across the university.

Bilingualism Matters was founded by Prof. Antonella Sorace at the University of Edinburgh in 2008 as a research and information centre dedicated to communicating findings on bilingualism and language learning beyond academia. Sorace, an internationally recognised linguist known for her work on bilingualism and language acquisition, established the centre in response to the growing gap between academic research and public understanding. In 2022, Bilingualism Matters relaunched as an independent social enterprise and charity, expanding into an international network committed to making language research more accessible to wider society. Its work brings together researchers, educators, policymakers, and community organisations to explore the ways in which language shapes education, health, identity, social life, and human experience more broadly. In Wales, where questions surrounding language remain tightly bound to history, community, culture, and national life, this form of public engagement feels particularly important. Discussions on bilingualism are often flattened into statistics, policy targets, or political disagreement, yet the lived reality of bilingualism is invariably far more complex, personal, and socially textured than such debates sometimes allow.

Bilingualism Matters @ Abertawe/Swansea was formally established in 2024 as the first —and to-date, only — Welsh branch of the wider international network. Based within the School of Culture and Communication at Swansea University and supported by the university’s Language Research Centre, the branch was launched in collaboration with representatives from the wider Bilingualism Matters network, including Prof. Antonella Sorace and Dr Katarzyna Przybycien. The branch is currently led by Swansea researchers Dr Gwennan Higham, Dr Geraldine Lublin, and Dr Vivienne Rogers, and aims to strengthen connections between academic research and the families, educators, and organisations involved in bilingualism and multilingualism across Wales. Although Welsh-English bilingualism forms an important focus, the branch is equally concerned with multilingualism more broadly, including questions surrounding migration, education, cognition, identity, and community language use.

The internship also challenged some of the assumptions that can arise when discussions of language in Wales focus too narrowly upon Welsh-English bilingualism alone. Alongside work relating directly to Welsh language policy and education, researchers were also engaging with questions surrounding international multilingualism, migration, heritage languages, translation, and intercultural communication. These conversations highlighted the extent to which contemporary Wales is linguistically far more diverse and internationally connected than public discussion sometimes acknowledges. Several researchers I spoke with were working on questions beyond Welsh and English. For example, work bringing university students into contact with Spanish-speaking asylum seekers in Swansea. Such work is a reminder that language, at its most fundamental, is about human connection

Much of my role centred upon speaking directly with researchers and professional services staff from across different parts of the university. Through the interviews, the project aimed to map the wide range of expertise relating to bilingualism and multilingualism already present across Swansea University. In practice, these discussions gradually became something rather broader: the beginnings of a network linking researchers working on language from very different disciplinary perspectives.

What also became increasingly striking over time was the extent to which researchers working in very different disciplines were addressing remarkably similar questions surrounding communication, education, identity, and social belonging. In some cases, these connections were immediately apparent; in others, they emerged only gradually through conversation. Moving amongst these different perspectives highlighted not only the diversity of work already taking place across the university, but also the potential value of creating stronger links between researchers who might otherwise rarely encounter one another’s work. What the internship demonstrated particularly clearly was that questions surrounding language rarely remain confined within a single discipline. Educational researchers, linguists, psychologists, language practitioners, and policy specialists were often approaching related problems through very different methods and vocabularies. Yet despite these differences, many were ultimately concerned with similar issues surrounding communication, participation, identity, learning, and social belonging. For me, this also echoed the breadth of perspectives encountered within Applied Linguistics itself. One need only look at the modules in Applied Linguistics at Swansea (Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism, and Language Policy and Planning) to see how researchers approach language from different vantage points.

It is well-observed that doctoral research can become isolating. Much of the PhD process involves long periods spent reading, writing, analysing, and thinking within the confines of a highly specialised topic, frequently with little opportunity to step outside the immediate demands of one’s own project. One of the most valuable aspects of this internship, therefore, was the opportunity to engage with a much wider research community and to encounter forms of scholarship very different from my own. Alongside developing practical and professional skills, including interviewing, networking, project coordination, and public engagement, the experience also served as an important reminder of the broader intellectual and social value of academic research itself. At a time when higher education can often feel increasingly fragmented, managerial, and pressured, opportunities for this kind of interdisciplinary conversation and public engagement seem especially valuable.

Another particularly valuable aspect of the project was its emphasis upon public engagement. Academic research can often remain confined within highly specialised disciplinary spaces, despite addressing issues that shape everyday life in profound ways. One of the central aims of Bilingualism Matters is therefore to create opportunities for research on language and bilingualism to become more publicly accessible and socially engaged. Throughout the internship, this repeatedly raised important questions about how universities communicate knowledge beyond academia, and how research might remain connected to the communities and social realities it seeks to understand.

In Wales, these questions carry particular significance. Discussions surrounding bilingualism and the Welsh language are often reduced to policy, statistics, or political disagreement, yet many of the conversations I encountered during the internship pointed instead towards lived experience: raising bilingual children, navigating multilingual classrooms, learning Welsh later in life, or maintaining language use across different social spaces and generations. One of the most valuable aspects of Bilingualism Matters @ Abertawe/Swansea is precisely its ability to bring these experiences into conversation with academic research.

As Bilingualism Matters @ Abertawe/Swansea continues to develop, I hope the branch can become an important space for collaboration and public engagement surrounding language in Wales. The internship left me with a far greater appreciation not only for the breadth of research taking place across Swansea University, but also for the value of creating connections between researchers, communities, and lived experience. At a time when questions surrounding language and identity remain central to public life in Wales, initiatives capable of bringing these different perspectives into conversation feel increasingly important.