Teacher agency and bilingual education. Who gets to decide how bilingualism is to be promoted?

Teacher agency and bilingual education. Who gets to decide how bilingualism is to be promoted?

Dr Lara Ann Vella is the Coordinator for the Language Policy in Education Unit at the National Literacy Agency. Her main research interests deal with the bilingual development of children both at home and in educational settings and the use of languages in the curriculum. She was involved in the research team that wrote the Language Policy for the Early and the Junior Years issued by the Ministry for Education and has coordinated research projects that help to shed light in the bilingual development of young children in the local context. She has published works on the way educators promote bilingualism in school settings and is a co-author of the National Literacy Strategy (2021-2023). She organises training seminars for parents and educators on the promotion of bi- and multilingualism as part of the National Literacy Agency’s work to promote the language policies in education. Her PhD thesis dealt with parents’ and their children’s language attitudes and ideologies towards Maltese and English in Malta. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Lancaster University.