Speakers

Prof. Leandro Rodrigues Alves Diniz

Leandro Rodrigues Alves Diniz holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the State University of Campinas and is an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. He has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at The Ohio State University and a Visiting Professor at Université Grenoble Alpes (CAPES/Print program). In 2024, he received a productivity grant from Brazil's National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). From 2025 to 2027, he will be a CAPES-Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on Portuguese as an Additional Language and Language Policy.

Prof. Siv Björklund 

Siv Björklund is Professor of Swedish immersion and Multilingualism at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. During her academic career, she has been actively involved in developing immersion and other bi-and multilingual education programmes in Finland and in developing initial and in-service teacher training for multilingual classrooms. Björklund has functioned as project leader of both national and international projects (incl. Listiac) and she is also one of the founders of the Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education (JICB, John Benjamins Publishing Company). Her research encompasses individual, institutional and societal bi- and multilingual issues. Recent research projects focus on the relation between praxis, ideology and identity in multilingual settings, dominant language constellations, bi- and multilingual pedagogies, writing in a second language, and minority speakers. 

Sanna Pakarinen

Sanna Pakarinen works as a university lecturer at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics (2020) from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests consist of linguistic landscapes in educational spaces, multilingual identities, educational leadership in bi- and multilingual programmes, and integration of language and content in immersion education. Pakarinen was the project coordinator of the Listiac project (Linguistically sensitive teaching in all classrooms) from 2021 to 2022. Currently, she leads a project investigating teachers’ beliefs about teaching methods supporting linguistic and cognitive development among pupils in one-way immersion programmes in Finland.