We’re starting a new series of posts about bilingualism labs around the world.  Our very first lab is the ESRC Centre at Bangor University.

The ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice (http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/)  was established at Bangor on 1st January 2007 for an initial five-year period, with funding from the ESRC, HEFCW, and the Welsh Assembly Government.

It is the first research centre in the UK to focus specifically on bilingualism. As such it will be part of an international network of similar research centres with whom we would like to interact.

Research within the centre is centred around five research groups: Neuroscience Research Group , Experimental-Developmental Research Group, Corpus-Based Research Group, Survey and Ethnography Research Group, Speech Research Group. There is more information on the work of each of these groups in the following link:

http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/research/index.php.en?menu=3&catid=6337&subid=0

The centre offers both an MA and a PhD in Bilingualism. For more information on our postgraduate programmes go to:

http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/pgprogrammes/index.php.en?menu=11&catid=6554&subid=0

Whether you are a researcher or a practitioner interested in bilingualism, we hope that you will interact with us by visiting, writing, phoning, or attending one of our conferences and workshops. This weekend past (Oct. 2^nd-3^rd), the centre hosted the first Bangor Postgraduate Conference on Bilingualism and Bimodalism. It is aimed at Masters’ and doctoral level students to come together, present their work and come in contact with new ideas. The main goal of the conference is to establish a forum for postgraduate students interested in all linguistic aspects of Bilingualism and Bimodalism. The area of bilingualism being by definition interdisciplinary, the conference reunites contributions from numerous fields, ranging from linguistics to psychology, education and sociology. English-BSL interpreters will be provided for the duration of the conference to enable Deaf and hearing participants to fully engage in all conference activities. The invited speakers are: Marianne Gullberg (Radboud University Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen), Ineke Mennen (ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice, Bangor University), and Adam Schembri (Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL), Univeristy College London). To see the full conference program, please go to:

 http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/conferencepg_programme.php.en

At the moment the centre has two calls for funding opportunities: the development fund  (http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk//devfund/index.php.en?catid=&subid=7211) and the visiting researcher programme http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk//research/VisitingResearchers.php.en?catid=&subid=7237).

If you are interested in bilingualism and in working with us, you can always apply for research associate status. Forms can be found on our website!