Current Issues in Second/Foreign Language Teaching and Teacher Development

Dr Christina Gitsaki is an Associate Professor and Research Coordinator at the Center for Educational Innovation at Zayed University, UAE. Dr Gitsaki has previously served as the UNESCO Chair in Applied Research in Education, designing professional development programs for teachers in the K-12 and higher education sectors. She has also served on the executive boards of professional associations such as the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, the Gulf Comparative Education Society, and TESOL Arabia, and is currently the Secretary General of the International Association of Applied Linguistics. She has published extensively and her research interests are in second language acquisition and pedagogy, the use of educational technology in the second language classroom, teacher professional development, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.Dr Thomai Alexiou is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the School of English of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She is also the coordinator of the postgraduate module 'Teaching English to Young Learners' at the Hellenic Open University. Her research interests include early foreign language learning and teaching, and material development for young learners. She has spoken at a number of teacher training seminars, and has published several articles and book chapters throughout Europe. She has co-edited the Special Issue: Vocabulary, Part II: Input and Uptake for the Language Learning Journal (2012) and is the co-author and co-editor of Magic Book 1 (2014) and Magic Book 2 (2013), EFL textbooks used by young learners in state schools in Greece.