Dr. Marie Therese Batardiere

Biography

Since taking up my appointment at the University of Limerick in 1985, I have been responsible for the development of courses in French for students of Business Studies, which culminated in the establishment of a new degree programme in Business Studies and a Modern Language.Co-founder in 1989 of the Erasmus student exchange between the University of Limerick and my former university of Angers, I am a strong advocate of an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach in the classroom and have adjusted various language modules to allow the joint participation of Erasmus and home students. My PhD research focused on the second language grammatical development of university-level learners experiencing immersion in the target language. I completed my PhD thesis in 2002 at Trinity College Dublin, under the supervision of Professor David Singleton.In 1997, I was awarded the first UL Teaching Fellowship. It entailed working on a project to enhance teaching and learning at the University of Limerick & to propose an action plan for the School of Languages and Cultural Studies. This led to the development of a Language Learning Framework which assesses students' language competence and supports students' language learning journey.I have been involved for many years in the field of education first as a member of the training team for secondary school teachers of French under the auspices of the Department of Education (Dublin) and since 2005, as Language Coordinator of the Professional Masters in Education at UL. In my role as Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Modern Languages & Applied Linguistics (MLAL) and as part the MLAL Quality Improvement Plan (2018), I chaired a working group which benchmarked and mapped eighty language modules onto the CEFR. During the pandemic, as an alternative to Erasmus+ Mobility, I oversaw the implementation of an innovative Transnational Virtual Exchange Project (TEP) with 5 European partner universities involving 600 students.