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Prof. Bessie Dendrinos

Professor of Sociology of Language and Foreign Language Education at the Department of Language and Linguistics, Faculty of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, she lectures on Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. She has extensive research, teaching and administrative experience. For several years she served as Head of Department and for two consecutive terms she was elected Chair of the Faculty. For six years she was a member of the University of Athens Senate and more recently she served on the board of directors of the Ionian University. 
She holds a B.A. from the Faculty of English Studies of the University of Athens (Greece), an M.A. in TEFL from the Claremont Graduate School and University Centre (U.S.A.), and a Ph.D. in Communication and Education Studies awarded from the Claremont Graduate School, after following a joint postgraduate programme at CGS and the University of California at Los Angeles. Her postdoctoral work was carried out in the UK, with the help of a Hornby Foundation Grant, as a fellow of the University of Cambridge and a research associate of the Institute of Education of the University of London. She has collaborated, taught and lectured at several universities in Europe and the USA and has been an invited keynote speaker at many international conferences in Greece and abroad.
Since the late 70s she has been involved with pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes and since the early 80s she has served as head of national committees that initiated reform in ELT school curricula and instructional materials. She is head author of a task-based learning coursebook series published by the Greek state and used in state schools for ten years. More recently she has been very involved with state language exams leading to a state certificate of language proficiency. Besides her responsibility as project leader for the preparation of the English Exams, since 2002 she has served as Head of the Central Examination Committee which functions in the capacity both of the Examination Board and the Administrative-Scientific Committee that has been developing the language examination system leading to a state certificate of language proficiency. 
Interested in socially accountable applied linguistics, Bessie Dendrinos is best known in Greece and abroad for her work in foreign language teaching, learning, and assessment, and particularly for her critique of mainstream foreign language didactics and evaluation systems, of the discourses of foreign language pedagogy and education planning in the European Union, and her concerns regarding the cultural politics of English as a ‘global’ language. Interested in the development of mulitilingual literacy for European citizenry, she is widely published. While some of her published work deals with gendered discourse, the language of bureaucracy in Greece, and the linguistic construction of (supra)national identity in present-day Europe, the main bulk of her publications concern foreign language pedagogy. Her books include The EFL Textbook and Ideology (1992) and The Politics of ELT (2001),The Hegemony of English, in collaboration with Donaldo Macedo and Panagiota Gounaris (2003), Policies of Linguistic Pluralism and the Teaching of Languages in Europe, edited in collaboration with Bessie Mitsikopoulou (2004). Having served as editor-in-chief of a journal, entitled Glossikos Ipologistis, about language and language education, published by the Centre for the Greek Language (2000 and 2001), she has written numerous papers and articles, which have appeared in English, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese in local and international publications. Presently, she is carrying out research on the language of poverty and she is co-editor of the special theme issue of the European Journal of English Studies, on New Englishes.

Personal web site: http:/rcel.enl.uoa.gr/dendrinos/

 

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