The EFL international chair programme welcomes four visiting professors in 2026, coming from Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Belgium and the Netherlands. Each will deliver a series of four seminars open to the EFL community, covering topics ranging from multilingualism and phonetic variation to the neurolinguistics of ageing and institutional discourse on migration.
Caroline Floccia (University of Plymouth, UK)
Visiting from 2 May to 1 June 2026, hosted by LLF.
Director of the Plymouth Babylab, Caroline Floccia has spent over two decades studying language development in children exposed to multiple languages or dialects. Her seminar series, Understanding Language Development Across Variation: Multidialectal and Multilingual Children, examines how young children process accent variation, build bilingual vocabularies, and how to fairly assess language skills in children whose linguistic exposure departs from the standard monolingual model.
Stefanie Keulen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel / Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
Visiting from 22 May to 4 June 2026, with a second stay planned in September, hosted at LPP (Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie) by Rachid Ridouane and Anne Hermes.
An associate professor at VUB and chairwoman of the Brussels Centre for Language Studies, Stefanie Keulen specialises in motor speech disorders, aphasia and foreign accent syndrome. Her series Speech, Language, and Ageing in Atypical Populations: Neuroscientific Perspectives will explore the links between brain, language and ageing, from primary progressive aphasia to neurostimulation techniques in mono- and bilingual patients.
Charles Chang (City University of Hong Kong)
Visiting from 15 November to 12 December 2026, hosted by Ioana Chitoran at LLF.
A professor of linguistics at City University of Hong Kong, trained at Harvard, Cambridge and Berkeley, Charles Chang studies the phonetics and phonology of language learning, language attrition and bilingualism among heritage speakers. His series Phonetic Variation and Change in Multilingual Contexts will examine the “native speaker” construct, the phonetics of heritage speakers, crosslinguistic influence, and phonetic drift and attrition across the lifespan.
Mieke Vandenbroucke (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Visiting in November-December 2026 (dates to be confirmed), hosted by Isabelle Léglise at SeDyL.
An associate research professor in linguistic pragmatics at the University of Antwerp and incoming Secretary General of the International Pragmatics Association, Mieke Vandenbroucke works on urban multilingualism and institutional discourse analysis. Her series Discursive Agency and Migrants in EU Family Reunification will address the role of language in EU family reunification procedures, and how computational methods can enrich linguistic ethnography.