cohesion - European Centre for Modern Languages

Sheils, Joseph is Head of the Department of Language Education and Policy at the
Council of Europe. The Department consists of three units: Language Policy Division,
European Centre for Modern Languages, European Charter for Regional or Minority
Languages. As Head of the Language Policy Division he is particularly involved in
developing European reference instruments and supporting member states in reviewing
their policies to promote plurilingual education.
Soll, Maie is responsible for language teaching and learning among ethnic minorities at
the Ministry of Education and Research. She participated in the ECML project
VALEUR. She deals with questions of quality of language teacher training. She is
writing her doctoral thesis about ethnic and national identity of language minorities at
the University of Tartu.
Stickler, Ursula was born and educated in Austria. She moved to the UK in 1993 and,
after working as a language tutor and language advisor at the University of Sheffield
and Sheffield Hallam University, she moved to the Open University, Milton Keynes, in
2002. There she has written materials for three distance-learning courses for German
and conducted research into tandem learning, autonomous learning and online language
learning and teaching. She has given several presentations and published papers on
these topics.
Stoks Gé studied English and Applied Linguistics in the Netherlands and Germany. He
taught English at a Dutch secondary school before joining the Netherlands Institute for
Curriculum Development (SLO). He was responsible for several major curricular
reform projects, including the introduction of English in primary education, the reform
of the modern languages curriculum in upper secondary education and the introduction
of the European Language Portfolio. He was the representative of the Netherlands on
the Council of Europe's Modern Languages Projects (1985-2001) and co-chaired the
Modern Languages Project Group between 1996 and 1998. He now works as a teacher
trainer at the Alta Scuola Pedagogica di Locarno in Switzerland, is co-owner of IDEA
Sagl and a member of the editorial team of Babylonia.
Taylor Torsello, Carol is president of CercleS (European Confederation of Language
Centres in Higher Education). She became full Professor of English Language and
Linguistics in 1994, and since 1997 she has held the Chair of English Language and
Linguistics in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Padua, Italy, where, besides
teaching in undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programmes, she has directed the
university language centre. She was President of AICLU (the Italian Association of
University Language Centres) from 2001 to 2004. Amongst her research interests are
systemic functional linguistics, linguistic approaches to literature, English language
teaching and testing, and e-learning. She is the author of numerous articles and nine
books, and editor of nine collected works.
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