SIF 3rd Cohort Fellows - Andreana Pastena, University of Warwick
Curriculum Vitae
- Education
2021: Postgraduate diploma in Active Learning Pedagogies, Universidad de Extremadura (Spain).
2016: MA degree in Linguistics, Università di Pisa (Italy).
2012: BA degree in Humanities, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (Italy).
- Experience
May 2018 – April 2022: Predoctoral Researcher, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona (Spain).
Member of the TRANSLINGUAM-UNI research project (UE-PGC2018-098815-B-I00).
October 2018 – April 2022: Teaching Assistant, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona (Spain).
BA courses: “Intercultural spaces, languages and identities”, “Discourse analysis”, “English for Humanities”.
January 2020 – March 2020: Visiting Predoctoral Researcher, Interdisciplinary Solidarity, Societies, Territories Laboratory, Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France).
Andreana is an active member of the GREILI-UPF research group and the ICLHE Association. She has also experience as a foreign languages teacher and an intercultural trainer.
- Publications/Research achievement
Research Project
Students’ narratives in internationalized Higher Education: Disentangling the relationship between language biographies, language practices, and intercultural interactions
Internationalization of Higher Education is turning universities into spaces of increasing intercultural contact and linguistic diversity. However, official language policies often disregard the use of languages other than the official one(s) and the international lingua franca, English. Likewise, although research has focused on the challenges faced by international students in academic and social integration, much less attention is paid to the role of plurilingual repertoires and identity negotiation in intercultural friendship formation and mutual intercultural learning.
This project explores how students navigate internationalized universities. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between students’ language biography and practices and the development of intercultural interactions at university by means of narrative inquiry. The project combines theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches from applied linguistics, social psychology, and network science, often segregated in current literature. The research takes the form of a case study with several phases of data collection and instruments (i.e. questionnaires, social networks, interviews, and focus groups). Participants are local and international students from two European universities: one located in an officially monolingual country (i.e. Warwick), and the other in a bilingual region (i.e. Universitat Pompeu Fabra).
Adopting an emic perspective, the study aims to explore how students make sense of and engage with their lived intercultural experiences and language practices, while giving them the opportunity to reflect on themselves and their experiences of intercultural learning. As such, results will put the focus on the relevance of self-reflection and ‘critical awareness’ in multilingual and multicultural societies.