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Academic Life

Academic affiliation, instruction, supervision

Bessie Dendrinos joined the Department of English Language and Literature at the NKUA in 1976 in a junior teaching position and worked her way up to full professorship in 1992. The undergraduate courses she taught were on foreign language didactics, sociolinguistics, and critical language studies. In the early 1990s she designed the Initial TEFL Training Programme for undergraduates in their senior year and later helped plan the new pre-service Teacher Education and Training Programme of the Department, in effect since 2013. From 2005 to 2015 she taught postgraduate courses in language didactics research, language testing and assessment, and supervised numerous dissertations in the context of the Department’s first postgraduate programme leading to an MA in Applied Linguistics. 

She has worked with PhD students in Greece and abroad, advising and supervising doctoral theses in foreign language pedagogy and critical analysis of the ELT discursive practices. A special mention of the group of 15 Language Testing and Assessment PhDs she supervised from 2005 to 2015, at which time she retired from her full-time teaching position to devote more time to research and writing, and to build a European alliance investigating issues related to multilingualism in education.

 
Administration

1989-1993: Head of the Language and Linguistics Division, Department of English, NKUA
1993-1997: Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature, NKUA
1991-1997: NKUA Senate Member
2003-2005: Member of the Board of Directors of the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece
2003-____ : President of the Examination Board for the KPG multilingual examination suite, Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs
2004-____: Director of the Research Centre for Language Teaching, Testing and Assessment
2005-2011: Member of the Directive Board for Postgraduate Studies of the Faculty of English, NKUA
2003-2008: Co-director of the interdepartmental gender studies programme of the NKUA
2016-____ : President of the European Civil Society Platform for Multilingualism
2020-____: Centre of Excellence for Multilingualism and Language Policy scientific committee leader

Recognition - Awards

1974-1975: Ford Foundation scholarship
1981-1982: Hornby Foundation grant
1983-2014: Consultant to the Greek Ministry of Education in matters of foreign language education
2000-2013: Expert advisor for the Centre for the Greek Language on issues of European language and language education policies
2004: The Hegemony of English (co-authored with D. Macedo and P. Gounari) received the 2004 American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Critics’ Choice Award
2011: Awarded with the European Language Label for the quality of an English for Young Learners national project which introduced the first foreign language from the first grade of primary school
2014: Elected president of the European Civil Society Platform for Multilingualism (ECSPM)
2015: Awarded the title of Professor Emerita by the NKUA
2016: A conference, entitled “The political and social discourse of FL education today in Europe” was organized at the NKUA to honour her 40 years of distinguished academic career (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjjpbx__HI).
2018: An edited collection was published as a Festschrift in her honour, edited by E. Karavas and B. Mitsikopoulou, Developments in Glocal Language Testing, published by Peter Lang. It contains contributions of PhD students who completed their work in Language Testing and under her supervision.
2020: A volume in Greek dedicated to her, entitled The Pedagogic and Political Discourse of Foreign Language Teaching (Ο Πολιτικός και Παιδαγωγικός Λόγος για τη Ξενόγλωσση Εκπαίδευση, εκδόσεις Πεδίο), contains contributions by 18 language scholars, from different Greek universities, who have worked with her over the last 20 years.

Professional involvement, academic activity, research: highlights 

Localisation of the global, the international discourse of ELT has been at the centre of her work from the early stages of her academic career. Therefore, her first major mission, in the 80s, was a large- scale project that resulted in localised materials for the teaching of English in state schools (1983-87), introducing a task-based language learning approach in practice and making innovative use of learners’ first language, which was still a very controversial issue in the dominant paradigm of TEFL. In the early 90s, she began investigating the ideological meanings in EFL textbooks, syllabuses and educational materials for the teaching of EFL. Becoming increasingly interested in the critical discourse analysis of materials, language policies and policy documents as well as the discursive practices of different social institutions, she investigated the social meanings articulated in a variety of texts, her main purpose being the social critique of practices aiming at reproducing the social order – be it the TEFL enterprise, gender inequality or bureaucracy.

In the 1980s

  • Organised and taught in the context of programmes for the training, education and professional development of EFL teachers mainly in Greece
  • 1979-1980 Founding member and vice-president of TESOL-Greece
  • Spent a year (1981-1982) as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, and at the same time she had an attachment to the Institute of Education, University of London
  • 1982-1983 Head of the team of experts appointed by the Pedagogic Institute of Greece who designed the first national communicative curriculum for English
  • 1983 Wrote and designed the first Teacher’s Handbook for the communicative teaching of English
  • Appointed as academic leader of a team of TEFL professionals, by the Pedagogical Institute of the Ministry of Education, a five-year action research programme was carried out, resulting in the first exclusively task based EFL textbook series: (Task Way English 1, 2 and 3 students’ and teachers’ books. The series was produced by the state publishing agency of the Ministry of Education and used in Greek junior high schools for 10 years (1986-1996)
  • Collaboration with the University of Lisbon, the Orientale in Naples, and the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, through an Erasmus exchange programme, which resulted in the Southern European Collaboration for Language Research

In the 1990s

  • 1991: Visiting scholar at the Department of Linguistics, University of Lancaster
  • First encounter and collaboration with Basil Bernstein
  • Collaboration with Emilia Ribeiro-Pedro and the CDA group (Fairclough, Kress, Martin-Rojo, van Dijk, van Leeuwen, and Wodak), which marked the beginning of her work in critical Applied Linguistics
  • 1992: Completed a 2-year research project investigating the ideological nature of FL textbook discourses
  • 1993-1997: Elected president of the Department of English, School of Philosophy, NKUA, and re-elected for a second term
  • In the 1990s she organised numerous national and international academic workshops, panels, conferences, and symposia, the most notable of which was the 4th International Symposium of Critical Discourse Analysis on “Language, Social Life and Critical Thought” in 1995, at the NKUA, which featured M.A.K. Halliday as the keynote speaker, and other prominent scholars such as Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen, Teun van Dijk, Ruth Wodak and many others. Halliday had just been awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the NKUA, proposed during her presidency at the Department of English Language and Literature
  • Special consultant on European language education policy issues to the Centre for the Greek Language (CGL) and collaboration with the eminent Director of the Centre’s Linguistics Department, the late A.-F. Christidis
  • Designed and produced the CGL’s e-journal for languages and language education, entitled “Glossikos Ypologistis” and served as editor of the first two volumes.

From 2000 to 2009

  • By the early part of the new century, critical language study was at the centre of her research interests, as she became more involved in investigating discourses of monolingualism, multilingualism and multiliteracies, of the ideological nature of FL pedagogy and of gendered practices in academia.
  • In 2001, she organised a European conference to celebrate the “2001 Year of Languages”, entitled “Plurilingualism and Language Politics in the EU: Foreign Language Education Policy in Greece.” Among the prominent speakers were Lid King from the UK, Peter Nelde from Belgium and Johanna Panthier from the Modern Languages Division of the Council of Europe. A bilingual volume (Greek and English) was created with the papers delivered at this event and it was edited by Dendrinos and Mitsikopoulou. It was published in 2004 by Metaixmio publishers.
  • In 2002 she moved beyond critique to social action and became involved with the development of a 'glocal' multilingual language proficiency examination suite for people living, working and studying in Greece. She led a team of FL didactics and testing experts from the NKUA and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, to begin the development of the KPG Multilingual Examination Suite, on the basis of the 6-level scale of the Council of Europe, which today offers exams in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Turkish for the certification by the Greek state, through the Ministry of Education. The exams, designed and produced according to common guidelines and specifications across languages:
      • offer context-sensitive testing opportunities to FL learners who are studying and working in Greece (and have Greek as a common language)
      • are intended to have a targeted backwash effect on foreign language education in primary and secondary school in Greece
      • are in the service of multilingualism in the global and national job market
  • 2003-2006: The KPG Examination Board of which she has served as president has been responsible for numerous actions related to the development of the exam system, such as producing the exam specifications, designing the regulations regarding the system as a whole. The KPG Examination Board is also responsible for exam delivery and administration, for the development of assessment criteria and rating grids and for supervision of the script rating centres. It also collaborates with teams of experts for the preparation of test papers (developing content, structure, design and the items themselves), for piloting the test papers and analysing the results for test validity, reliability and stability, and for final formatting, checking and rechecking possible changes. 
  • In 2004 she founded and later became the Director of the Research Centre for Language Teaching, Testing and Assessment (RCeL), which developed into a fully equipped unit at the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens. Initially concentrating exclusively on the KPG exams project, she worked with a team of young scholars, supervising research on testing issues such as the effect of text and reader variables on reading comprehension, the role of the examiner in oral testing, the development of mediation skills, test-taking strategies in the KPG exams, and world representations in reading comprehension texts. Also, work at the RCeL concentrated on research related to the validity of the test tasks, assessment and marking reliability. In the 10 years that followed (2004-2014), the RCeL offered numerous services to the foreign language teaching community in Greece and beyond, published a series of books and journals, offered e-infrastructures including e-repositories to store and manage large quantities of data, and to easily retrieve organised information, original data bases for item analysis and for retrieving linguistic information concerning tests.
  • In 2007, upon securing funding from the ESF and the Greek state (3.425.400€), she directed a project at the NKUA, which was the cornerstone of the development of the KPG multilingual suite. By the end of 2008, the team had generated: (a) validated levelled descriptors aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), (b) detailed specifications and guidelines across languages for the papers testing different levels of different language competences; (c) levelled assessment criteria, (d) the KPG scoring system, (d) specifications for the script-rating centres, (e) specifications and materials for examiner- and script-rater training programmes.
  • From 2003 to 2008: Upon securing funding form the ESF and the Greek state (280.630 euros) she directed the PEDYAS project, on the basis of which the Department modernised its undergraduate curriculum, established and fully equipped a Centre for Self-Access Learning and Materials Development. The project also helped fund and design the Department’s first portal and to launch the Synthesis e-journal for literary theory. Upon completion, the project received excellent reviews by its three international external evaluators.
  • At the same period, she was scientific director, in collaboration with Prof. Stella Vosniadou, of a pioneering project which led to an interdepartmental gender studies programme. Gender related courses were introduced in the undergraduate curricula of eleven departments of the NKUA, including Medicine, Law, Theology, Social Sciences and Humanities. The project, with the Greek acronym THEFYLIS, allowed us to organise public lectures with prominent speakers from Greece and abroad to discuss gender bias in Greek academia, to publish gender related books and reports, and the first gender studies of Wikipedia in Greek (http://www.fylopedia.uoa.gr). This project was the basis for the NKUA’s gender policy and the Gender Equality Centre.
  • In 2009 she was elected a board member of the European Federation of National Institutions for Language (EFNIL) and served as a member of its executive board for a three-year term.

From 2010 to 2015

  • 2010: She represented EFNIL in the Language Education Work Group for the European Commission’s Civil Society Platform for the Promotion of Multilingualism which was initially launched in 2009 and re-launched in 2012.
  • 2010-2012: Appointed as member of the committee to develop guidelines for the Greek national school curriculum reform.
  • 2010-2013: Having secured funding (270.000 euros) for the NKUA, she directed a research project which led to a coherent and realistic Greek foreign language education policy following European policy strategies and recommendations for the promotion of multilingualism.
  • 2011: Selected by the European Commission as an independent expert to act as reviewer for the research project “Language Dynamics and Management of Diversity” (DYLAN), funded through the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities contributing to the creation of the European Research Area and to innovation. The research was carried out by a network of 12 European universities.
  • 2014: Began re-structuring the European Civil Society Platform for Multilingualism, independently from the European Commission as an NGO.
  • 2010-2014: Having secured substantial ESF co-funding (4.730.000€) she directed a multifaceted research project to officially introduce English from the year one of primary school. It involved the development of context sensitive courses for the teaching and learning of English for young learners.
  • 2010-2015: Having secured substantial ESF co-funding (4.293.000€), she directed a project with a view to developing the KPG examination suite to full maturity and to build a fully automated platform with custom-related application systems for the e-KPG. The project was implemented by the NKUA in partnership with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and in collaboration with the Computer Technology Institute of the University of Patras, developing an electronic platform for computer adaptive testing in all KPG languages.
  • 2010-2015: She directed a national project which involved 25 language teaching professionals for the design and development of the Integrated Foreign Languages Curriculum (IFLC) which was adopted in 2016 as the national curriculum for foreign languages in compulsory education. The illustrative descriptors of leveled communicative competence of the IFLC was aligned to the CEFR.
  • 2011-2015: In collaboration with V. Gotsoulia and the assistance of RCeL staff, she created a multilingual database, designed as the essential methodological apparatus for specifying benchmarks of language proficiency, and for furnishing comparable descriptions of levelled communicative performance across languages.
  • 2012-2015: In collaboration with V. Gotsoulia, she built the KPG English Corpus to determine the linguistic 'profile' of the Greek learner of foreign languages included in the school curriculum. It comprises the essential research basis informing, on an ongoing basis, the IFLC and supporting the development of novel teaching materials tailored to the needs of Greek learners. The Corpus comprises collections of written texts (scripts) produced by candidates in the KPG examinations in English. The script collections have been systematized in a Script Database, maintaining a balance across proficiency levels, types of tasks which candidates are asked to perform as well as communicative environments to which they are asked to respond using the target language.
  • While directing the projects above, for which more than 100 language professionals (ICT educational statistics experts and interactive graphic designers) were selected and given full- or part-time employment, she continued teaching, supervising PhD students, and serving as external examiner, and external referee preparing academic review for colleagues in Greek higher institutions and universities in Europe, USA and Hong Kong.

2015 to now

Retired from a full-time teaching position, she continued to supervise or be a member (in a limited number of) PhD committees, to direct the RCeL of the NKUA and serve as president of the KPG Examination Board and as scientifically responsible for the KPG exams in English. In addition:

  • 2015-2017: She served as a member for the National Board of Education Reform
  • 2016-2017: She was Head of an FL advisory committee of the Institute of Educational Policy, which is a consultant to the Ministry of Education. After research and several surveys, the committee completed an extended report on the state of FL education in Greek state schools
  • 2016-2019: Reviewer of research projects for the Social Sciences, mainly for the strand of education, to be funded by the National Research Foundation
  • 2016-____: As RCeL Director, she has been organising professional development courses for language professionals from various European countries, particularly Spain, funded through the Erasmus+ programme
  • 2015-____: She is a member of the Professional Network Forum of the European Centre of Modern Languages in Graz, Austria, and has been attending annual consultation meetings
  • 2016-2018: She is a consultant to the European Commission on issues about multilingualism in education.
  • 2015-____: President of the European Civil Society Platform for Multilingualism (ECSPM), which comprises of 20 European networks, organisations and institutions as members and has established partnership with institutions concerned with languages and diversity in Europe and beyond. Listed in the European Commission Registry, it offers council to the EC’s EAC and takes part in various European projects – the most recent of which is the European Language Equality (ELE) project. In the context of the ECSPM, she founded the Cluster of University Research Units for Multilingualism (CURUM), which is contributing to the development of the European Education Area.
  • ECSPM holds annual symposia which are hosted by a different university each year. She has been president of the organising committee for the following: 
  • 2020-2022: ECSPM is a full-fledged partner in the European Language Equality a flagship project of the European Union and as a partner the ECSPM is responsible for a number of European regional and minority languages, plus several heritage languages spoken in EU Member States.
  • 2020-_____: Director of the Scientific Committee of the Centre of Excellence for Multilingualism and Language Policy (CEM), in the context of which she founded the Observatory of Multilingualism, which has been conducting four major research projects related to languages in Greece and Cyprus, as well as to bi- and multilingual education. As of 2021 the CEM Observatory of Multilingualism has officialised partnership with the Centre of Excellence – Permanent Linguistic Observatory (for Italian abroad and immigrant languages) of the University for Foreigners of Sienna (L'Università per Stranieri di Siena) in Italy, and the Observatoire européen du plurilinguisme (OEP).
  • 2020-_____: Founding member of the CIVIS Multilingualism Network (CMN); that is, a group of scholars in theoretical and applied linguistics (from European universities which make up the CIVIS European university consortium) sharing knowledge, research, and their aim which is to provide the universities of CIVIS with an academic environment that respects the rich linguistic diversity of its students and members of staff, advocates plurilingual education, and promotes multilingualism in studies and research. The CMN has been working since 2020 toward designing a common (among the CIVIS universities) MA degree programme in Multilingualism and Language Policy, has planned the Seminar Series entitled “Multilingualism: the language of CIVIS” offered online 2021-2022 to senior language study students and young scholars, and is preparing a language policy for the CIVIS universities on the basis of common criteria and standards.