A brief CV

Patricia Arnaiz Castro, PhD, graduated from the University of Granada as a Translator (1995) and as an English Philologist (1996), and then from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) as a PhD. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Specific Didactics of the ULPGC, and she teaches both future English primary and secondary school teachers at the Faculty of Education. Her key research areas include: foreign language learning, affective factors and bilingual education. She is a member of the ULPGC Research Group Translation, Interpreting and Language Learning (TrIAL-520), where she was the Director since 2014 to February 2021. She was the co-editor of Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (LFE) from 2016 to 2018. She was the ULPGC coordinator of the English university entrance exam since 2014 to 2018. She is the Director in ULPGC of the ERASMUS + Project ‘PlayingbeyondCLIL’ (VG-IN-BE-18-36-047300) (2018-2021). She is a member of the Research Spanish National Project entitled ‘Facing Bilinguals: Study of Bilingual Education Programmes’ Results through Social Data Analysis’ (2018-2021).

The amazing benefits of being bilingual: evidence from individuals

The benefits of being bilingual are undisputable nowadays, and it conveys three dimensions that, up to these researchers’ best knowledge, have never been analyzed together before: a. Mobility; b. Intercultural Competences; c. Employability. Human mobility – either voluntary or forced – occurs throughout the world today, employability is a human concern throughout life and intercultural competence is what keeps us together as human beings. Our talk will look at these three dimensions through the eyes of former bilingual learners.With better understanding of the benefits bilingualism affords (regarding those three dimensions), we believe we can contribute to supporting the great task of education stakeholders. In this plenary we will look at some of the work carried out by the researchers of the project “Facing Bilinguals: Study of the results of the bilingual education programs through the massive collection and analysis of data extracted from social networks” (BESOC) (EDU2017-84800-R). In particular, we will present and discuss data from bilinguals collected across five different countries ( Spain, Portugal, Colombia, Brazil and Canada) through an online questionnaire designed and validated by the BESOC researchers.