On Friday, January 22, at the School of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Navarra, the thesis issue 1000 was read. development skill Violetta Dmitrenko achieved the Degree of doctor with her work Language Learning strategies for the development of plurilingual competence in european languages in adult learners.The thesis is an example of an interdisciplinary, international and applied work of research in the field of Humanities, directed by Concepción Martínez Pasamar and co-directed by Ruth Breeze .

Both professors had already worked together on other occasions and in different areas: in the teaching of languages, from ILCE and the institute of modern languagesD. student, but also in the Master's Degree in teaching of Languages of the School of Philosophy and Letters -where the doctoral student was a student-, and the group of research on Analysis of the speech (GRADUN). From these experiences and the direction of other thesis related to language didactics, as well as from their multilingual condition, which they share with Violetta Dmitrenko, they saw the interest of a research in this line, which required the doctoral candidate to master several languages (in her case, Russian, English, French, German and Spanish).

The new doctor, who obtained a predoctoral scholarship from the Government of Navarra, has, in addition to this characteristic, the knowledge of different traditions of teaching and a great capacity for work and analysis, which have allowed her to undertake a research in a field still in ferment, with the challenges that this entails.

Violetta Dmitrenko, prior to her doctorate, completed a double Master's Degree in Secondary School faculty and high school diploma and a Master's Degree in teaching English/Spanish as a second language at the University of Navarra. She has been a PIFstaff researcher in training) in the department of Philology of the School of Philosophy and Letters.

"I have been lucky enough to be able to develop my life's dream: to investigate how multilingual people study new languages and how they develop their multilingual skill ", says Violetta, who assures that the great lesson of this thesis is that "it is never too late to study languages. Among a wide variety of learning strategies, everyone can find their own, which will help them not only to compensate for some disadvantages but also to reduce the time and effort needed to learn a new language language".

In the future she would like to pass on the knowledge she has acquired and her reflections on the development of the skill plurilingual to other teachers who are in training or who have already been working for many years at teaching. He would like to continue with research and innovation in the teaching of languages for the promotion of plurilingualism.

data on the thesis defended in the School

The first doctoral thesis was defended in the academic year 1963-64 by Gerald Francis Lange. The issue of thesis by areas are: Philosophy: 400; History and Art History: 253; Philology: 161; Education: 151 (as of September 1, 2014, the thesis of this discipline are part of the School of Education and Psychology); Geography: 22; and Humanities:13.

Of the 1000 thesis , 330 have been carried out by international researchers and 670 by Spanish researchers, of which 248 are from Navarra. As a curious fact, if they were put online, they could add up to approximately 350 kilometers and more than 700,000 pages.

This academic year has the singularity of changing the regime of thesis defense (determined by Decree Law). Thus, all students who enrolled before the 2012-13 academic year must defend their work of research before February 11. Thus, during the 2015-16 academic year, issue will reach 50 doctoral thesis defended, a figure not reached so far in any other academic year.