Course Tutors

Kathrin Eberharter is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Innsbruck,  where she guides pre-service teachers in the principles of best practice for language testing and assessment. She earned an Austrian teaching degree and completed her MA and PhD at Lancaster University, specializing in language testing. Her primary research interests centre on evaluating L2 writing and speaking, with a dedicated focus on task development, writing processes,rating scale design, and rater cognition and training.

Judit Kormos is a Professor in Second Language Acquisition at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes involved in learning and using additional languages. She has published widely on the effect of dyslexia on learning additional languages including the book The Second Language Acquisition Process of Students with Specific Learning Difficulties (Routledge, 2017) and the most recent edition of Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences (Multilingual Matters, 2023). She was a key partner in the EU-sponsored Dyslexia for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language and the Comics for Inclusive Language Teaching projects, both of which won the British Council’s ELTon award. She has run teacher education workshops and webinars on inclusive language teaching in a large variety of international contexts.

Marije Michel (PhD Applied Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam) is professor of Second Language Acquisition and chair of Language Learning at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research and teaching focus on cognitive and social aspects of second language acquisition and task-based language pedagogy. She is known for mixed-methods approaches to investigating second language processing, for example, when looking at second language writing processes and alignment in digitally mediated communication. Marije Michel is a member of the executive committee of the European Second Language Association (EuroSLA), the International Association of Task-based Language Teaching (IATBLT) and the Netherlands-based English Academy for Newcomers. From April 2 to 4, she will be hosting the TBLT 2025 Conference in Groningen.

Koen Van Gorp (PhD, KU Leuven) is Assistant Professor of Second Language Studies and TESOL, and Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Coordinator in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University. He co-directs (together with Paula Winke) the Second Language Assessment and Curriculum (SLAC) Lab, and is founding Co-Editor (together with Kris Van den Branden) of TASK. Journal on task-based language teaching and learning. ). Before moving to the U.S.A., he worked for 25 years at the Centre for Language and Education (KU Leuven, Belgium) where he was involved in the development and implementation of task-based language teaching in Flemish education. His research interests are task-based language teaching and assessment, language-in-education policy, critical multilingual awareness, and multilingualism.

Paula Winke is the Michigan State University "Arts and Letters Professor" and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Innsbruck. Paula researches language testing and individual differences in SLA. Paula is Senior Editor within the British Council's Assessment Research Awards and Grants (ARAG) program. She has awards from the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (2008 Article of the Year), TESOL International (2012 Distinguished Researcher), and the American Association of Applied Linguistics (2020 Article of the Year). In 2021, Paula won the Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in World Language Education from ACTFL, the Modern Language Association, and the Modern Language Journal.