Languages and intercultural competences are crucial for the development of a knowledge-based European society and constitute a great challenge for institutions of Higher Education. Not only are multilingualism and multiculturalism at the heart of European social cohesion and integration, but the kinds of communication and transferable skills developed by quality language programmes are among those most needed in a highly competitive and rapidly evolving job market. The European Conference on “The Role of Languages in an Enlarged Europe”, held at the Luiss Guido Carli in May of 2004, constituted a forum in which European experts and academic stakeholders met to discuss the latest developments with regard to language policy and language education in an expanding Europe and an increasingly global world. What emerges from the conference papers is a conception of individual and societal multilingualism and multiculturalism as a dynamic and enriching process, in which European Higher Education institutions are called upon to play a decisive role by integrating the teaching of English as a lingua franca with that of other languages in the elaboration of a multilingual pedagogy within a polycentric model of education.

Linda Lombardo is professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Faculty of Political Science of the Luiss Guido Carli and, since 1998, Director of the Institute of Modern Languages, now University Language Centre. Prior to that, she taught English in the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, where she was responsible for the Socrates Erasmus Programme and Head of the European Programmes Commission. She has published widely, particularly with regard to language acquisition, discourse analysis and corpus-assisted discourse studies, and participates in national and European-level research projects in these areas.