Last week the project members attended The 11th conference of the International Association for Research in L1 Education in Tallinn, Estonia. Researchers from all over the world gathered there to present ongoing research and to network. In addition, the weather in Tallinn was fantastic.
Doctoral students Anders Westerlund and Sofia Jusslin participated in the PhD-students’ pre-conference on Wednesday. Anders presented his ongoing project and Sofia participated as audience.

The main conference started on Thursday and doctoral student Sofia Jusslin presented a study Exploring multimodal texts in three educational text environments co-authored by project members Katarina Rejman, Siv Björklund and Ria Heilä-Ylikallio.

During Thursday afternoon the project members also found time to prepare for the next day’s round table, which is a collaboration between our writing project and the Boston Writing Project lead by our friend and collegue professor Denise Patmon at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, USA. Denise could not unfortunately attend the ARLE conference, but she was with us on video instead.

The theme of the round table was emancipatory writing. Professor Ria Heilä-Ylikallio and professor Siv Björklund were the discussants and the project members presented different views on and raised several questions regarding emancipatory writing. In the end, an interesting discussion highlighted different point of views on emancipation and writing.

On Friday night, we got to enjoy a lovely conference dinner at the most beautiful scenery right outside Tallinn at the Estonian Open Air Museum.
The Writing Proficiency Project thanks the organizers and look forward to the next ARLE conference in Lisbon, Portugal in 2019.