Profile:

In her role as Research Associate on strand 5 of the MEITS project, Lisa-Maria has compared the progress language learners of different ages make in their acquisition of reading, listening, speaking and writing skills. Strand 5 has developed a testing battery for CEFR levels pre-A1, A1 and A2, which is currently being piloted in schools across the UK with the aim of starting testing at the beginning of the academic year 2017/18. In addition to these language tests, Strand 5 has also designed a questionnaire on students’ language learning history, their motivation and the perceived status of the language they are studying. The results of this questionnaire will be related to students’ language proficiency in order to gain a better understanding of how these factors influence language learning. The first questionnaires have been distributed to students in year 11 in schools across the country and are currently being analysed. Lisa-Maria is a qualified secondary school teacher of foreign languages with experience in Vienna and London. In her PhD thesis, she studied typical and impaired English-Polish bilingual development in a longitudinal twin case study.