Christina Laporda , Secretary & Treasurer  

I have been teaching English since 1992. I used to be the owner and DoS for three schools of foreign languages in Greece for about 22 years. After moving to the UK in 2018, I worked as an EAP tutor and lecturer for the University of Central Lancashire. My personal experience during the transition from general English to academic English, together with my previous experience as a DoS, are probably the main reasons why I got interested in teacher education, which was actually my MA dissertation topic.

In 2022, I started my PhD on Intercultural Competence (IC) and EAP. My research focuses on the integration of IC within the EAP curriculum as a learning outcome and on ways of assessing it. I consider EAP an amazing field with a lot of unexplored potential, which, for me, is what brings teacher education into the spotlight.

Today, I am a senior lecturer, and since September 2023, I have been the Course Leader for the International Foundation Year for one of UCLan’s partnerships, HBU-UCLan, a joint school in Hebei, China.