Raising Bilingual
& Multilingual Children Forum

Hugh Dellar
Session: Hitting the wall with bilingual kids

Hugh Dellar is a London-based teacher and teacher trainer with over twenty years experience in the field. He has taught all ages and levels, both in the UK and also in Indonesia, where he lived for four years. He worked for University of Westminster for 18 years, but is now the co-founder of Lexical Lab and has recently co-written the methodology book Teaching Lexically for Delta Publishing. He is the co-author of two five-level General English series, Innovations, Outcomes and Perspectives published by National Geographic Learning, as well as numerous papers and articles for many ELT publications. Hugh has given teacher training and development sessions in over twenty countries including Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Spain, Russia, Italy, Japan and Thailand. He has spoken on such wide-ranging topics as the nature of English as a Lingua Franca, the uses and abuses of corpora, approaches to teaching grammar and vocabulary, as well as many others.

Vita Khitruk
Session: Assessment in bilingual preschoolers (elective bilingualism)

Some teachers are in a way like parents: they leave a mark in your life and determine your future path. Vita met her Teacher more than 20 years ago, and he gave her the greatest gift there is – love for English. As a result, Vita won FSA/FLEX exchange programme and graduated from the Dalles Wahtonka Union High School in the Dalles, Oregon. In 2009 she graduated from Kiev National University of Taras Shevchenko with a BA in philology, majoring in English literature. In 2012 Vita went on to complete her MA, majoring in general linguistics. That same summer she did her CELTA course with BKC-IH Moscow. Since then Vita has completed a lot of qualifications, including IH-CAM, IH Certificate in teaching young learners and teenagers, and right now she is in the process of completing her Delta. Vita is raising her son as a bilingual kid, and hopes, that their elective bilingualism journey will help her son to become a well-rounded individual.


Ray Carleni
Session: Cutting the zipfian tail of language input

Ray Carleni is a Montenegro-based English teacher, founder and CEO of Nova Anglia Summer Camp in Montenegro, founder of Nova School of English group of schools and co-founder of English as a Native Language Project in Russia (preschool immersion program). Ray has worked in the ELT field for over 19 years. He grew up in Armenia where he entered Yerevan University of International Relations, and graduated in English Language and Literature from Saratov State University in Russia. Ray takes special pride in his trilingual and quadrilingual children, with whom he's been implementing the OPOL system for over 8 years now. Two of his children sat SESOL exams, his son Karlen passing A1 and A2 level, both with distinction at the age of 6 and his daughter Emmi achieving A1 level at the age of 5. Ray loves science and music, neuroscience and jazz in particular.

Julia Nikonova
Panellist

Julia is the founder of Windsor English Language School, a chain of schools in Russia and Spain. Founded in 2003, the school celebrates its 15th anniversary this year.
Julia graduated from a university as a linguist and later got her MBA from the Open University (UK) to support her growing business. She is also a member of TESOL Spain.

Julia has a bilingual daughter, who speaks both Russian and English fluently and also learns Spanish.

In Julia's schools, early years language learning is one of our key programs, as she believes that is the right age to start acquiring languages. To support parents, who want to help their children get immersed into English, her company produces a line of educational products for kids called Toy Troubles, which include books, jigsaw puzzles, colouring books, and games with augmented reality technology and supplementing apps.

Anastasia Bykova
Session: English as a native language project: Boosting language development

Anastasia has worked in the field of education for over 11 years. She is an English teacher and an in-house teacher trainer for Nova School of English, where she holds the position of the Director of studies. She is also an Oral Assessor/Interviewer for Pearson Test of English and Co-founder and Director of English as a Native Language Project (preschool English language immersion program (facebook.com/native64), where she has been working for 4 years now, developing teaching material and fostering English language acquisition through creating full immersion environment. Anastasia has experience in participating in and organizing events, including a TEDx event in Russia.
Anastasia loves arts and music, she draws and plays the acoustic guitar.

Olga Dakhina
Session: Practical tips for your bilingual journey

Olga is a mother of a 3-year-old daughter, whom she is trying to raise as a bilingual kid following the OPOL method. Olga is the founder of an English-speaking parents community in Moscow and a portal dedicated to teaching young learners ( myenglishkid . ru). Her main occupation is simultaneous interpreting. Olga holds CELTA, as well as MA in conference interpreting from the University of Westminster, London.

Maria Belevantseva
Session: Bilingual Parenting – How to Start

Maria is a passionate, enthusiastic teacher with over seven years' experience teaching in bilingual schools, homeschool groups and ESL courses to different age groups from young learners to adults. Maria relying on her experience with bilingual children and having grown up bilingual herself consults parents on issues of bilingualism and second language acquisition in early childhood. Currently, she is working at The International School of Tomorrow and runs an extracurricular bilingual learning club in Newson's Language Centre for children ages 3-11. Maria is a proud mother of two bilingual children. She also has substantial experience in organizing English-language events, seminars, conversation clubs, performances, parties, and camps.


Masha Andrievich
Session: Using Storyboards with Very Young Learners

Masha is a teacher and teacher trainer based in Moscow. She works at New School in Ramenki where she is in charge of the Primary English department and also a teacher. Her professional interests are Young (and Very Young) Learners, assessment, materials development, CPD and local professional community. Masha runs workshops and courses (both online and on-site) about all things concerning teaching young learners. Masha holds a CPE and also a Delta from IH Barcelona. She has also enjoyed a variety of courses such as IH Certificate in Teaching Young Learners, NILE Testing and Assessment and some more. She blogs at theclass.blog and is the administrator of Moscow ELT Meet Up group on Facebook.

Daria Timoshchuk
Panellist

Daria Timoshchuk is a teacher, founder and leading methodologist of SmartFox chain of early development centres. Daria also co-authors Lingoland multilingualism magazine as well as a bilingualism and early development blog at www.kidsmi.ru. She runs various courses for owners, teachers and administrators of early development centres, gives conference talks on preschool and alternative education, foreign languages and educational business.
Daria is a proud mother of two multilingual children growing up with 4 languages.