English Interactive Language Café
Dr Adam Mastandrea is currently an Assistant Professor at Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology and a former US State Department English Language Fellow in Lithuania. He holds degrees in Philosophy, Applied Linguistics, and Educational Psychology. Adam has taught in Poland, Japan, Montana, and Hawai’i. Before coming to Lithuania, Dr Mastandrea served as an Assistant Professor and was Director of field experience in the Department of Education at the University of Montana Western.
French Interactive Language Café
Dr Vita Valiukienė, a Vilnius University graduate, has been working at the Department of French, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, since 2006. She teaches modern French, French history and civilization, supervises students’ Internship on corpus linguistics. Dr Valiukienė’s research interests encompass modality, corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, and the teaching methodology of modern French. She has compiled the fiction corpus of the Bilingual French-Lithuanian/Lithuanian-French dictionary (2 million words). Since 2004, Dr Vita Valiukienė has been a DELF–DALF examiner at the French Institute in Vilnius. Since 2005, she has been an active member of the French Teachers’ Association of Lithuania, serving as Vice President from 2017 to 2019. Vita organizes educational summer schools for teachers of French in schools and universities. In 2020, the Ministry of Education, Research, and Sports expressed their appreciation to Dr Vita Valiukienė for disseminating French language and Francophone culture in the Republic of Lithuania.
German Interactive Language Café
Dr Vaiva Žeimantienė is Associate Professor of German Language and Linguistics and Head of the Department of German Philology at the Institute of Baltic Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University. Her teaching and research foci are the grammar of the contemporary German language, contrastive linguistics, and the role of the German language in education and research. Shehas compiled and published such publications as ‘Sprache in der Wissenschaft. Germanistische Einblicke’ (2014, co-edited with Eglė Kontutytė) and ‘Germanistik für den Beruf’ (2020, co-edited with Ulrike Haß and Eglė Kontutytė) at Peter Lang Publishing House.
Italian Interactive Language Café
Dr Diego Ardoino is currently an advanced postdoctoral fellow at the Institut für Slavische Sprachen und Literaturen and at the Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS) of the University of Bern (CH). Dr Ardoino joined the Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University in 2015, though his teaching career has always been intertwined with such courses as Baltic philology, general linguistics, and theory and practice of translation, taught at both Pisa University and Vilnius University. Dr Ardoino’s interests encompass such fields as historical sociolinguistics, Baltic philology, Old Prussian, Lithuanian, Baltic languages, Italian dialectology (dialects of Liguria), historical linguistics; and language contact.
Lithuanian Interactive Language Café
Dr Inga Hilbig is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Lithuanian Studies, Institute of Applied Linguistics, Vilnius University. She has extensive experience teaching Lithuanian as a foreign language and Lithuanian day-to-day life culture. Her research interests are sociolinguistics (bilingualism), linguistic (im)politeness, and cross-cultural communication.
Norwegian Interactive Language Café
Dr Vuk Vukotić is a sociolinguist working at the Institute of Baltic Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University. He holds degrees in Scandinavian studies and Communication, and his research interests include language policy, language ideologies and the history of linguistics. He has also been actively teaching Norwegian since 2013.
Russian Interactive Language Café
Dr Anastasija Belovodskaja is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Baltic Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University. Since 2018, she has been a member of the Presidency of the Media Linguistic Commission of the International Slavic Studies Committee (under the auspices of UNESCO) (St. Petersburg University, Russia), an organiser of VU.ACADEMIA.RU (2016-2019), one of the creators of the international programme ‘Russian Online’ (2014-2017) and ‘Problemorientierter Soft CLIL Ansatz für nichtenglischen FS-Unterricht’ (2018-2021). Dr Belovodskaja was a member of the Organising Committee of the programmes ‘Improvement of the Media and Information Literacy Competencies’ (2019-2020) and ‘Tęsk’ [‘Continue’] run by the National Educational Agency (2020-2021).
Spanish Interactive Language Café
Dr Carmen Caro Dugo has been teaching Spanish at Vilnius University since 2000, and is currently an Associate Professor working for the Department of Romance Linguistics at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Philology. She teaches the courses on syntax and translation in the study programmes of English-Spanish Linguistics and Spanish Philology. Her research interests lie in the comparative grammar of Lithuanian and Spanish, artistic translation, translation theory and practice, as well as the intercultural aspects of translation. A translator of Lithuanian literature herself, she has translated famous Lithuanian works into Spanish, including “Metai” [‘The Seasons’] by K. Donelaitis, “Anykščių šilelis” [‘The Forest of Anykščiai’] by A. Baranauskas, and ‘Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea’ by D. Grinkevičiūtė, as well as a 20th century ‘Anthology of Lithuanian Poetry’, and a ‘Collection of Short Stories’.