Konta Irini
Dr. Irini Konta is a graduate of the Department of Philology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with a specialization in linguistics (BA, 1997). She holds a postgraduate diploma in “Teaching Modern Greek as a mother tongue and as a foreign / second language”, with a specialization in teaching Greek as a foreign / second language (2000) and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the same university (2013, state scholarship). Her Ph.D. thesis focuses on the acquisition of gender in Greek by Turkish-speaking children.
She was employed as a high-school teacher (of Greek language and history) from 2003 to 2013. During that period, she has worked in high-schools with a high percentage of Turkish-speaking children. She was also a research associate at the Centre for the Greek Language from 2013 to 2020. More specifically, she has worked at the Division for the Support and Promotion of the Greek language, where she was involved in the organization of the exams for the Certification of Attainment in Greek language, the development of preparatory exam materials and the statistical analysis of the exam scores. She was also involved in teacher training. She is a member of the Laboratory and Teaching Staff of the Department of Linguistics of the Greek Philology since September 2020. Her research interests include bilingualism, the acquisition and teaching of Greek as a foreign/second language and as a mother tongue, language assessment, as well as inflectional and derivational morphology.
She is currently involved in research projects for the teaching of Greek as a second/foreign language, such as “Teach for Integration” and “Routes in teaching Greek as a second/foreign language”. She has published articles in international conference proceedings and has edited books with preparatory material for the Certificate of Attainment in Greek Language.