Position: Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Email: enlli.thomas@bangor.ac.uk

Phone: 01248 383053

Location: 2nd Floor Main Arts 

Enlli Thomas is Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science as at Bangor University, and Professor of Education Research. She has been a Visiting Professor at Umeå University, Sweden since 2018, and is the 2019 recipient of the prestigious Learned Society of Wales Hugh Owen Medal for outstanding educational research in Wales. 

Her main research interests and expertise span psycholinguistic approaches to the study of bilingual language acquisition, including children’s acquisition of complex structures under conditions of minimal language input, bilingual assessment (psychometric), and education approaches to language transmission, acquisition and use. She has conducted research and published widely in many areas of language study. These span papers on aspects of bilingual acquisition, including impact factors influencing successful L1-L2 acquisition; bilingual transfer; bilingual assessment; bilingual literacy; Executive Function and bilingualism; socio-economic status and language abilities; and factors influencing language use. She gives regular invited lectures to practitioners and child-care workers both in the education and in the mental health sector on topics relating to language development and bilingualism, and had made regular appearances on tv and radio as an expert informant. She has also been invited as a Keynote at numerous international conferences.  Her work has also generated substantial national impact - most notably in the development of statutory Welsh language initiatives that are operational in schools across Wales. 

She has been involved as a co-author on a number of successful large-scale research grants, looking at language transmission practices in the home (Welsh Language Board), cognitive effects of bilingualism across the lifespan (ESRC), developing Welsh language assessment tools (Welsh Assembly Government), neuropsychological assessment of bilingual Welsh-English speakers (North Wales Research Committee & West Wales NHS Trust Research and Development Grants Awarding Committee) and bilingualism and dementia/Parkinson's (ESRC). More recently, she was co-I on the CorCenCC National Welsh Corpus project (£1.8 Million - ESRC/AHRC) where she led on the development of a pedagogical toolkit for use in schools. She has also led on various Welsh Government funded projects related to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

She was a core member of the Executive of the ESRC Centre for Research on Education in Theory and Practice 2007-2012. 

In 2014 she became Head of School for the School of Education and Human Development, before returning to focus on her core research in 2018.

Selected research grants held

2022

Welsh Government (Collaborative Evidence Network): Impact of the pandemic: Welsh-medium recruitment (Thomas & Lloyd-Williams, £62,000)

2021

Welsh Government/GwE: Ein Llais Ni (Thomas, £63,200) 

2020

Welsh Government: The impact of covid-19 on non-Welsh-speaking families with children in Welsh immersion schools (Thomas, Lloyd-Williams, & Waters, £75,000)

2019                       

Hefcw: Provision of Welsh-medium STEM subjects  (Thomas, £39,974)

ESRC IAA: Addressing the literacy needs of bilinguals learning to read and write in languages with transparent orthographies (Thomas, Owen, Young, Lloyd-Williams, Fontaine, Aldridge & Sullivan, £14,800)                                                          

2017                       

GwE/Welsh Government: Y Gymraeg mewn Addysg (Thomas, £65,000)

2016 

ESRC/AHRC: Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes (The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh): A community driven approach to linguistic corpus construction (Knight, Morris, Fitzpatrick, Rayson, Thomas, Stonelake, Evas, Spasic, £1.8 million)

2015

Welsh Language Commissioner Office: Ymchwil i Sefyllfa gyfredol addysg Gymraeg ar gyfer dysgwyr 3-16 oed/Research into the current state of Welsh education for 3- to 16-year-old learners (Cwmni Iaith (Jones, PI) & Bangor University (Thomas & Williams, £10,980)

Post 16 Education Consortia: Datblygu Systemau a Gweithdrefniadau i Fesur y Defnydd o’r Gymraeg mewn Addysg/Developing Systems and Processes to Measure the Use of Welsh in Education (Cwmni Gweiniaith (Roberts – co-PI) & Bangor University (Thomas, co-PI, Williams, Jones & Young, £35,000)

2014 

National Literacy Trust: Evaluation of Premier League Reading Stars Cymru (Ware, Thomas (co-PIs), Williams, Young, Kyffin & Elliott, £16,000)

2011

Welsh Government: Exploring the role of classroom language transmission practices in developing L1/L2 fluency in Welsh (Thomas & Lewis, £10,000).

2010 

ESRC: Bilingualism as a protective factor in age-related neurodegenerative disorders (Clare, Gathercole, Thomas, Hindle, Whittacker, Bialystok, & Craik, £630,000)

Hunaniaith and Welsh Language Board: Arolwg o ddefnydd cymdeithasol plant cynradd o’r Gymraeg/Survey of primary children’s social use of Welsh (Roberts & Thomas, £20,000)

2009 

Welsh Government: Continued Development of Standardised Measures for the Assessment of Welsh (Gathercole & Thomas, £90,000).

2007    

ESRC: Cognitive effects of bilingualism across the lifespan (Gathercole & Thomas: £720,000)

North Wales Research Committee: Does bilingualism delay the onset of dementia? A pilot study comparing bilingual Welsh/English and monolingual English speakers (Clare, Thomas, Whitaker, & Jones, £5,000)

2005 

Welsh Assembly Government:  Development of Welsh language assessment tools for children (Gathercole & Thomas: £90,000)

North Wales Research Committee: Neuropsychological assessment of bilingual Welsh-English speakers: meeting the needs of Welsh-speaking older people (Thomas, Clare, Woods, & Jones: £5,000)

2003

Welsh Language Board: Trosglwyddo Iaith mewn Teuluoedd Dwyieithog yng Nghymru (Gathercole, Thomas, Deuchar & Williams; £93,000).

Teaching and Supervision

XAC-2033 Ymchwilio mewn Plentyndod 

XAC-3009 Amlieithrwydd mewn Plentyndod

XAE-3009 Multilingualism in Childhood

XMC-4099 Dwyieithrwydd mewn Addysg

MA Supervision

PhD Supervision