APVEA2021

Keynote Speakers:

We are fortunate to have two exceptional speakers this year:

Our first speaker is Emerita Bañados who is an associate professor of English, and Master of Educational Technology, at the Department of Foreign Languages,  in the Universidad de Concepción, Chile (UdeC). From 2001 to 2018 she led the design, and development of UdeC English Online, an interactive multimedia b-learning environment for communicative English teaching and learning, as well as a b-learning program for academic English and acculturation in English speaking environments. She had previously directed the creation of other internet projects such as a a center of web resources and a Language Café for learning English, French and German. Her experience and  research interests include language b-learning and e-learning environments, CALL materials design, virtual exchanges, task-based language teaching, and collaborative work in intercultural video web interaction projects.

Emerita Bañados has presented widely at international conferences in Europe (WorldCALL, EUROCALL, IATEFL), the United States (CALICO, TBLT); and has been invited as Key Speaker at the WorldCALL 2013 Conference in Glasgow, UK; At the CALL Research Conference 2008, University of Antwerp, Belgium; at the National Society of Higher Education Language Teachers (SONAPLES, 2013), Chile. She was also invited as special guest keynote speaker to the APEC 2005-2006 in Future Education Forum in Busan, South Korea. She was invited twice to work as an international expert (Beijing, Shanghai, 2009) to write a proposal for a "Cyber ​​Network for Language Learning" (CNLL) by the UNESCO National Commission of the government of China. She has also been invited by different universities in Chile to work as a national expert technical assistance for their English language teaching and learning projects with use of ICT, granted by the Chilean Ministry of Education.

She has published in CALICO, RECALL, The European Journal of Applied Linguistics & TEFL journals, WorldCALL book, TELECOLLABORATION 2.0 book, and other journals. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the CALL Journal (Taylor & Francis); and other national and international journals. She has been coeditor of WorldCALL 2018 proceedings book, and currently served as  Guest Editor of a Special Issue "Post-pandemic Technology Enhanced Language Learning"(2021) for Sustainability,  an international, cross-disciplinary, scholarly,  peer-reviewed and open access journal of environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings.

She is a member of the WorldCALL Association Steering Committee and was the local Chair for WorldCALL 5 (2018), held for the first time in Latin America, in Concepción, Chile. She is currently the President of LatinCALL, the newly created Latin American Association of Computer Assisted Language Learning. She brings a wealth of knowledge on VE in Latin America and will be a wonderful speaker to hear. We are very grateful that she will take the time to speak with us.

We are honored to have Yuka Akiyama (Ph.D. in Linguistics, Georgetown University) present too. She is a Junior Associate Professor/Lecturer at the University of Tokyo. Her research interests include second language acquisition (SLA), task-based language teaching, and discourse analysis in the context of virtual exchange. Her publications on various video-mediated eTandem projects have appeared in journals such as Language Learning, Modern Language Journal, TESOL Quarterly, System, and CALICO Journal.

We are privileged to have such wonderful keynote speakers for APVEA2021. You can see their presentation titles and abstracts here.

You may have noted that our previous keynote speaker is not mentioned above.

Due to unforeseen circumstances Mohamed Abdel-Kader has had to leave the Aspen Institute and has decided that he can no longer give the keynote address. We are very disappointed that we have lost the opportunity to hear Mohamed speak.