Élissa Beaulieu has over fifteen years of experience in the field of French as a second language. Beaulieu has been NCLC Program and Partnerships manager at the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks (CCLB) since 2010, where she has provided leadership in training instructors teaching French as a second language to immigrants. She has also played an integral role in the development of language training, pedagogical resources, and placement and performance tests for newcomers living in minority francophone communities.
Monique Bournot-Trites is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. She teaches second language methodology in the Teacher Education program, and courses in second language assessment, research methods, and reading foundations at the graduate level. In 2010, she developed a French M.Ed. cohort at UBC taught by Web conference for French teachers across Canada, for which she has been the academic supervisor. Recently, she has been the project lead for writing the Theoretical Language Framework for the Canadian Language Benchmarks. She is currently working on research with colleagues from UBC and the University of Toronto, comparing the reading skills of Anglophones and allophones in French immersion elementary school. Most of her research interests are in French immersion: in particular, research on the acquisition and development of second language, content learning in an additional language, evaluation of languages, intercultural competence, the teaching of grammar, and learning disabilities. She did her Master’s Degree (1986) in School Psychology at UBC, and the title of her thesis was “Bilingualism and Reasoning Ability.” Her Ph.D. (1998) was in Educational Psychology at UBC; her Ph.D. dissertation was titled “Relationships between Cognitive and Linguistic Processes and Second Language Production in French Immersion.” She taught in French immersion in grade 1 and grade 3 before becoming a faculty member at UBC.
Samira ElAtia, recipient of the McCalla professorship, is director of graduate studies and associate professor of language education and the director of graduate studies at the bilingual faculty, Faculté Saint-Jean, of the University of Alberta. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in language assessment and evaluation of competencies; her research interest focuses on issues of fairness in assessment. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks in Ottawa. She has served on expert boards of several international testing agencies: Educational Testing Services in the USA, Pearson Education in the UK, The International Baccalaureate Organization, Chambre du commerce et de l’industrie de Paris, and the Centre international des études pédagogiques of the Ministry of Education in France. Recently, she has been interested in the use of data mining techniques and learning analytics in educational research. Her latest book, Data Mining and Learning Analytics in Educational Research, has been published by Wiley&Blackwell (2016).
Eve Haque is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University in Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include language policy and ethno-linguistic nationalism, and immigrant language training regimes and multiculturalism. She has published in such journals as TESOL Quarterly; Pedagogy, and Culture and Society, as well as the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. She is also the author of Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2012).
Monika Jezak has worked since 1996 at the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute, where she presently acts as Assistant Director. She conducts research in areas of language policy and planning, multilingualism, adult immigrants’ bi-literacy, adult immigrants’ second language education, and sociolinguistics of immigration. She has almost thirty years of experience in teaching French as a second language within various settings, such as immersion classes, various adult immigrant programs, and university. She has over fifteen years’ experience in training second language teachers. She participated in the development and administration of language tests as President of the French as a Second Language Ottawa-Carleton Contest and as Coordinator of the FSL Certification Tests at the University of Ottawa. She has provided expertise to UNESCO and, since 2009, has acted as an expert in language policy at the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks.
Morgan Le Thiec holds an M.A. in French as a foreign language and a Ph.D. in Linguistics. She is a lecturer at the Département de didactique des langues at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is also a specialized consultant in French as a Second Language (FSL) for adult immigrants and in the training of FSL teachers. She participated in updating Quebec’s scale of French competency levels of adult immigrants and in the creation of the French curriculum guidelines for adult immigrants in Quebec. For several years, she has collaborated with the Centre for Canadian Benchmarks, creating online resources and training for adult immigrants and their instructors in Canadian classrooms.
Enrica Piccardo is Associate Professor at OISE, University of Toronto, and at the Université Grenoble-Alpes, France. She has extensive experience in language teaching, teacher training, and second/foreign language education research. A CEFR specialist, she has been collaborating with European Institutions on international projects (the ECML in Graz, Austria, as project co-ordinator, and the Council of Europe as project member). Her monograph From Communicative to Action-Oriented: A Research Pathway (2014), available on line, is being used in teacher education in Canada and beyond. She is the principal investigator of two SSHRC-funded research projects, QualiCEFR and Linguistic and Cultural Diversity Reinvented (LINCDIRE), and of a Council of Europe–funded project, QualiMatrix. Her research focuses on emotions and creativity in language education, assessment and its role in the curriculum, plurilingualism, and teacher education. She has presented in many countries and published in different languages. Some recent articles include one in TESOL Quarterly (2013), a co-edited issue of The Canadian Modern Language Review (2015), and a book chapter, “The impact of the CEFR on Canada’s linguistic plurality: a space for heritage languages?” in Rethinking Heritage Language Education, edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas and Themistoklis Aravossitas (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Anne Senior has over twenty-five years of education, experience, and expertise in the fields of adult English as a Second Language (ESL) and French as a Second Language (FSL) education and training, federally, provincially, and privately. Anne is the president of ASTEC Inc., an Ottawa-based language and cross-culture consulting company. She acts as a specialist consultant for the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks and contributed to the revision of the Canadian Language Benchmarks: English as a Second Language for Adult Learners and the Canadian Language Benchmarks: English as a Second Language for Adult Literacy Learners. Anne also supports the implementation of the CLB as a national standard through tool development, training, research, and policy advice. She is a member of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada’s Newcomer Language Advisory Body, the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership, and the language table of the Canadian Network of Agencies for Regulation.
Antonella Valeo is an Assistant Professor at York University, where she teaches graduate courses in applied linguistics and ESL to undergraduate students. Her research focuses on instructed second language acquisition, form-focused instruction, and language teacher education and development. She has consulted on the CLB validation project and other CLB-related initiatives.