Dendrinos Bessie

BESSIE DENDRINOS is professor emerita of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Director of the Research Centre for Language Teaching, Testing and Assessment of the Department of English, Chair of the board of the multilingual examination suite known as the KPG, and President of the European Civil Society Platform for Multilingualism.

Bessie Dendrinos has had a distinguished career in influencing foreign language education in Greece, strengthening the pedagogy and evaluation of several languages… She has led the way in opposing racism and linguicist hierarchies of language and her work has contributed to the avoidance of such beliefs and practices in foreign language education. Rather than accepting the myth of the purported neutrality of any language, and passive acculturation to a target national culture, she has maintained that pedagogy should be consciously intercultural, plurilingual, translingual, that it should ensure additive rather than subtractive language learning, and be supported by proficiency testing that is locally anchored and administered.
Robert Phillipson