ECIS MLIE Conference 2027

Language Without Limits: Empowering Multilingual Learners

The theme for the conference is Language Without Limits: Empowering Multilingual Learners

Our 2024 conference focused on overcoming boundaries to enable multilingual learners to thrive academically and emotionally. Under the theme From Borders to Bridges, we explored how barriers can be dismantled across languages, within school structures, across communities, and between research and practice. The conference also marked a significant milestone as MLIE celebrated its 40th anniversary.

Building on this foundation, the 2027 conference moves the conversation forward by asking: how are schools empowering multilingual learners today? While we now have a strong understanding of how barriers can be addressed, this year we aim to explore how these ideas are being implemented in practice three years on.

The conference will focus on the following topics:

Multilingual Mindsets: Practicies & initiatives

Leading for Multilingualism

How do schools foster genuine multilingual mindsets across their communities?

This strand explores the practices and initiatives that support student wellbeing, belonging, and identity, including the role of student voice in shaping multilingual environments. It also examines the resources and approaches that actively leverage students' full linguistic repertoires as assets in learning.

Systemic change in multilingual education requires leadership at every level. This strand looks at how schools develop and sustain school-wide policies, structures, and systems that support multilingualism, including bilingual schooling models. It also considers how schools and leaders build meaningful cooperation with other schools and regional authorities to extend impact beyond their own walls.

Technology and Multilingualism

Research-Informed Practices that Empower Multilingualism

Inclusion and Multilinugalism

Technology is reshaping what is possible in multilingual classrooms and school communities. This strand explores how AI and digital tools are being used to empower learners and their families, and asks what it means to use technology thoughtfully and equitably in service of multilingual education.

Research offers a vital foundation for practice, but applying findings across diverse international contexts requires careful reflection and adaptation. This strand covers planning and collaboration, building academic language, early learners and multilingual development, empowering students' full linguistic repertoire, and assessment. It welcomes practitioners who draw on research to inform their work, as well as those who are generating new knowledge from within their own settings.

Multilingual learners do not form a homogeneous group, and effective inclusion requires understanding the full range of learner needs. This strand focuses on identifying those needs through observation and assessment, and on building the knowledge and strategies required to ensure all multilingual learners can access and thrive within their educational settings.

Your ticket will include:

• The chance to connect with educators supporting multilingual learners in international schools around the world
• Full access to every workshop, with plenty of practical, interactive sessions (22-24 January 2027)
• New strategies, tools and ideas you can take straight back to your classroom
• Refreshments and lunch on every conference day
• Entry to the exhibitor hall to explore the latest resources for multilingual and language learning