Prof DAVID CRYSTAL who is highly read and cited writer, editor and is best known for his two encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (3rd edn 2018). He was founder-editor of the Journal of Child Language, Child Language Teaching and Therapy, and Linguistics Abstracts. He is currently patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and the Association for Language Learning (ALL), president of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders and the UK National Literacy Association, and an honorary vice-president of the Institute of Linguists and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. He is a past honorary president of the National Association for Professionals concerned with Language-Impaired Children, the International Association of Forensic Phonetics, and the Society of Indexers. He was Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003-4 and honorary president of the Johnson Society for 2005-6. He received an OBE for services to the English language in 1995, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2000.
Professor Dr. Madhu Sharma has Ph.D. in teaching ESL and Spanish from the Ohio State University, USA. Currently, she is teaching Academic ESL and Spanish at the Mt. Wachusett Community College (MWCC), Massachusetts. She also serves as the Coordinator of the ESL Program and an active member of the Community Colleges.
Her areas of interest include: pedagogy and second language learning, classroom related research, curriculum, resources and support for ESL students, student-retention and success, and learning language through culture and culture through language.
Dr. Madhu has presented at the MATSOL, TESOL, USA, Thai TESOL, the NELLE (Networking English Language Learning in Europe), in Austria, Greece and Germany, and SPELT. A Fulbright alumnus, Madhu has participated in the teacher exchange program of the Massachusetts Council for the International Education (MaCIE) with Netherlands.
Prof. Charlene Polio
She is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Linguistics & Germanic, Slavic, Asian, & African Languages at Michigan State University, where she teaches in the MA Program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and the Second Language Studies Program. Her main area of research is second language (L2) writing. She is particularly interested in the various research methods and measures used in studying L2 writing as well as the interface between the fields of L2 writing and second language acquisition. She has also published and done research in the areas of second language acquisition, foreign language classroom discourse, and behavior differences in novice vs. experienced teachers.
She has conducted workshops for foreign language teachers through MSU’s Center for Language Education and Research, a federally funded Title VI Language Resource Center of which she is a co-director. She has been a visiting instructor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto and Teachers College, Columbia University. She has taught ESL at MSU, UCLA, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Graduate School in Beijing, and Philadelphia Community College.
She is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly and was also the former associate editor of the Modern Language Journal.
Professor Francisco A. Marcos-Marin
Francisco A. Marcos-Marin, is Professor of Linguistics and Translation at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He has worked as visiting Honorary Professor in various universities of the world. Presently, he is expert in European Research council. He is the author of more than fifty books. He has also translated books and papers from English and Portuguese into Spanish and published more than three hundred contributions in scientific journals, collective volumes in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, P.R. of China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Spain, Thailand, Switzerland, and the United States of America. He has delivered more than one hundred and fifty papers, read at national and international scientific meetings, and has taught in more than one hundred and twenty workshops of specialization in different countries.
Current areas of Research and Teaching: Linguistics and Typology, Cultural History of Medieval Spain, History of the Spanish Language and the Romance languages of Roman Africa and Hispania, the Linguistic History of Texas, Historic Rock Art and Semiotics of Rock Art.