Contact details: dragana.bozic@ferit.hr 
Affiliation: Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology Osijek, Croatia
ERLA key words; students’ learning preferences, teaching methodology, teaching materials, grammar and vocabulary acquisition, pedagogical content knowledge
ERLA key problems: How do we compose our language(s)? How do we experience our language(s)? How do we develop our language(s)? How do we treat our language(s)?
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I have been an ERLA member for a couple of years now. I first joined the ERL Network in 2018 and enjoyed meeting new potential collaborators there. However, upon Michal had step up the ERL Association, I realized that more concrete cooperation, joint publications either within the ERL Journal or edited book collections (such as “In the Search of A Language Pedagogical Paradigm“) and projects can be carried out within the ERLA umbrella, so I joined it. Supporting Michal as the editor-in-chief, I enjoy my role of a lead editor for the ERL Journal where I cooperate with talented researchers as well as consistent and objective reviewers. I particularly enjoy my role of a co-organizer of the ERL online Sessions, which Michal and I started as a more informal counterpart to more scholarly ERL Conferences, which I am very much looking forward to. 

 The concept of the educational role of language has an interdisciplinary character co-founding our beliefs, activities, affects and thinking (Scope Minor), which are realized in different teaching methodologies as well as co-shaping individual and group identities and cultures (Scope Major). Professionally, I concentrate on teachers applying different teaching methodologies in teaching English as a foreign language or English for specific and academic purposes. In doing so, both teachers and students develop their identities whose cultural underpinnings I am interested in.

On the most general level, my ERLA aspirations are to boost the educational role of language. I would like to work on bringing language and educational sciences even closer together. I believe in the premise that every teacher is a language teacher, which means that language is embedded in ideas, concepts and contexts of all subject areas. Teachers helping students recognize key concepts in their respective fields and properly communicate their ideas in different contexts is what makes every teacher a language teacher. Having that said, I would like to cooperate with the ERLA members, jointly research the said premise being contextualized, disseminate research results in ERL events and publish in the ERL Journal.

    I am predominantly interested in exchanging examples of good teaching practices with the ERLA members. Specifically, I would like to jointly work on the issues of language identity, intercultural competence and teaching English for specific and academic purposes. Being an ERLA member, I participated in a COST Association project, which was, unfortunately, not selected for funding. However, we formed a strong team of international scholars who are ready to work towards a joint goal – boosting the educational role of language.