Francesca Helm

Expert in online intercultural exchange and professional development in English-medium instruction

Francesca is an assistant professor of English and translation at the University of Padova, Italy where she also coordinates several online exchange programs and European projects such as ‘Soliya’ and ‘Sharing Perspectives’. She also supports the university’s language centre in organizing and offering professional development for lecturers in the area. Francesca is currently a member of the executive board of EUROCALL (the European Association of Computer Assisted Language Learning) and represents the University of Padova in the Coimbra Group’s Education Innovation working group, for which she was recently nominated vice-chair. In addition to developing training programmes and regularly networking amongst HE and policy professionals, she carries out research on English-medium instruction and the development of universities as multilingual and multicultural learning spaces. Francesca has a Master’s degree in Teaching English Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from the Institute of Education, University of London, and a Bachelor’s degree in art history and Italian from the School of European Studies, University of Sussex, England. She is currently working on her PhD at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. Francesca was until 2016 a Resource person for the EAIE Expert Community Language and Culture.