About us
Our collaboration began in the spring of 2018, when Dr. Mojca Kompara Lukančič visited UNITBV as part of an Erasmus+ teaching mobility program. During her visit, hosted by Dr. Cristina Dimulescu, Erasmus+ coordinator for the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Letters in Brașov, and Dr. Andreea Nechifor, who invited Dr. Lukančič to lecture for her students, the foundations for a long-term academic partnership were established. Later that year, in autumn 2018, Dr. Dimulescu and Dr. Nechifor reciprocated the visit, traveling to Dr. Lukančič's host university in Slovenia. This exchange marked the beginning of their joint involvement in the Erasmus+ project LanGuide.
The partnership continued to develop in April 2023 at the 20th Mate Demarin Days International Scientific Conference on "Diversity and Interdisciplinarity in Education" in Pula, Croatia. There, Dr. Dimulescu and Dr. Nechifor met Dr. Iva Blažević from the host institution, as well as Jelena Gugić, a Ph.D. student under Dr. Lukančič’s supervision. Their shared interest in integrating AI into university-level language acquisition research led to discussions about a new Erasmus+ project proposal, with Dr. Lukančič—who also delivered a keynote address at the conference—joining the effort to realize this vision.
The consortium was further strengthened with the addition of Dr. Francesco Costantini, a distinguished expert in applied linguistics, recommended by Dr. Lukančič. His involvement enriched the project’s scope, bringing valuable insights drawn from their previous professional collaborations, including contributions to monographs, peer reviews, and mutual citations, all of which fostered a solid foundation of academic trust and respect.
This partnership’s strength lies not only in its academic expertise but also in its strategic advantages. The geographical proximity of the Croatian, Italian, and Slovenian institutions facilitates sustainable travel, while UNITBV provides a complementary Eastern European perspective. Together, this dynamic consortium exemplifies the power of international collaboration, advancing educational research with innovation and dedication.
Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania
Andreea Nechifor, PhD
Project Manager
Andreea Nechifor, PhD, is an associate professor at the Faculty of Letters of Transilvania University of Brasov, teaching courses in applied linguistics, communication, and English language methodology. She has worked both as an expert and as a manager on various European and national projects including POSDRU, CNCSIS, Leonardo da Vinci and Erasmus+.
Her expertise and research focus on discourse analysis practices, language acquisition strategies, e-learning platforms, language teaching in the digital era and educational policies.
Cristina Dimulescu, PhD
Project Member
Cristina Dimulescu, PhD, teaches Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis courses at the Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania. She is interested in the subtle way in which identities and relationships are built in talk-in-interaction and come into being as a combination of linguistic and para-linguistic elements in the context of utterance.
University of Maribor, Slovenia
Mojca Kompara Lukančič, PhD
Institutional Coordinator
Mojca Kompara Lukančič, PhD is an associate professor from the University of Maribor, where she teaches English and Italian and a translator for the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Slovenia. She is actively involved in project work and publishing. Since 2015 she has been project leader of 5 projects. In her academic career she has been visiting scholar at over 10 foreign universities.
Her main research fields include abbreviations, lexicography, language teaching, translation, and bilingualism.
Tilen Smajla, PhD
Project Member
Associate Lecturer Mr. Tilen Smajla, Ph. D., is a teaching assistant for the English language and the Methodology of the German language and currently occupies the position of German language instructor at the Faculty of Tourism, Brežice, University of Maribor. He is a scientific researcher at the Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security at the Ljubljana, University of Maribor. He also teaches English for an Italian elementary school.
His main research interests are second language acquisition, early foreign language learning, distance teaching and the use of artificial intelligence in ESP/ESL teaching and learning. He has widely published in Slovenia and abroad.
Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia
Iva Blažević, PhD
Institutional Coordinator
Iva Blažević is a Full Professor in the field of social sciences (kinesiology) from the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula (Croatia). She teaches kinesiological courses at the University Integrated Undergraduate and Graduate Teacher Study, the University undergraduate study Early and Preschool Education, the University graduate study Early and Preschool Education, the doctoral study New Educational Paradigms and at all departments which have the elective course Kinesiological culture in their educational programme. She filled the post of chief of the teacher training study department, vice dean and the dean of the Faculty of Educational Sciences.
Jelena Gugić, PhD candidate
Project Member
Jelena Gugić is a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia, where she teaches courses linked to the English language and its acquisition in early learning. She is a doctoral student in the field of linguistics at the Postgraduate Doctoral Study of Humanities of the University of Zadar, Croatia.
Her interest lies in the contrastive analysis of linguistic elements, especially collocations, in the Croatian and English language through the prism of the Language management theory. She is also interested in the sociolinguistic factors leading to language change.
University of Udine, Italy
Francesco Costantini, PhD
Institutional Coordinator
Francesco Costantini is an associate professor in linguistics at the Department of Humanities and cultural heritage studies at the university of Udine. He obtained his PhD in Linguistics from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
His research focuses on the syntax and semantics of subordination in Romance languages, on the syntax of minoritized languages in Northeast Italy, with special reference to German language islands, sociolinguistics of minoritized communities, history of ideas on language.
He is currently principal investigator in a national research project (PRIN) on contact-induced language change in minoritized languages. Additionally he manages the local unit of a project targeting syntactic variation and change in Italian dialects. He has also led projects on language documentation.
He teaches courses in the field of historical linguistics, indoeuropean linguistics, research methodology in linguistics, and communication.
Eleonora Gallitelli, PhD
Project Member
Eleonora Gallitelli is an associate professor of English Language, Linguistics and Translation at the University of Udine (Dpt. of Humanities and Cultural Heritage), where she teaches English for Tourism. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from IULM University, Milan. As a research fellow at Roma Tre University, she was involved in the extended partnership CHANGES (Cultural Heritage Active Innovation of Nex-Gen Sustainable Society), funded by the Italian National Resilience and Recovery Plan (NRRP).
Her main research interests are translation and reception studies, ESP teaching, discourse analysis and ecolinguistics.
Emanuela Li Destri, PhD candidate
Project Member
Emanuela Li Destri is a PhD student at the University of Udine (Italy), focusing on the periphrastic construction “verb of motion + a + infinitive” in Italian. She is part of a research project that investigates the vitality of morphosyntactic features in minority languages in contact situations. She has training in computational linguistics and has worked on the creation of an ASR model for Zahre Sproche, a low-resource Germanic language spoken in the Italian Alps. Moreover, she has investigated the most frequent neostandard features in the written language of university students and she has studied italiano popolare among semi-literate individuals, particularly the autobiographical writings of Vincenzo Rabito.
Her interests include sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, morphosyntax, historical linguistics, and computational linguistics.