On January 22, the number of PhD dissertations defended in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Navarra reached one thousand. Violetta Dmitrenko obtained a doctoral degree for her dissertation Language Learning strategies for the development of plurilingual competence in European languages in adult learners. (Las estrategias de aprendizaje de idiomas para el desarrollo de la competencia plurilingüe en lenguas europeas en alumnos adultos). This dissertation presents a piece of interdisciplinary, international and applied research in the Humanities supervised by Concepción Martínez Pasamar and Ruth Breeze.

Both of these professors had already worked together on other occasions and in other areas: in training future language teachers within the ILCE and Institute of Modern Languages, as well as in the Master's program in Language Teaching (English and Spanish) formerly organized by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and in the GradUN research group in the Instituto Cultura y Sociedad. Based on this experience and that of supervising other theses related to language didactics, as well as on their own plurilingualism, these professors helped Violetta Dmitrenko to develop her research area, which required her to master several languages (Russian, English, French, German, and Spanish).

Violetta Dmitrenko was awarded a pre-doctoral scholarship by the Regional Government of Navarra. Apart from her plurilingualism, she possesses an extraordinary capacity for work which allowed her to carry out challenging research in an emergent area of inquiry.

Before her PhD studies, Violetta Dmitrenko completed a double Master's program at the University of Navarra, in Secondary Education and in Teaching English/Spanish as foreign languages. She was also a trainee researcher (PIF - Personal Investigador en Formación) in the Department of Linguistics of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

"I was lucky to be able to fulfil my lifelong dream: to investigate how plurilingual individuals learn new additional languages and how they develop their plurilingual competence", highlights Violetta. She claims that the main conclusion of her research is that: "it is never too late to study languages. Among the wide variety of language learning strategies, everyone can find their own strategies, which will help them not only to compensate for some disadvantages but also to reduce the time and effort necessary to learn a new language."

In the future, she wants to share her knowledge and reflections concerning the development of plurilingual competence with other language teachers who are pursuing their pre-service training or who have been teaching languages for many years. She would like to continue with research and innovation in language teaching so as to foster individual multilingualism.

Data on the PhD dissertations defended in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences

The first PhD thesis was defended in the year 1963-1964 by Gerald Francis Lange. The total number of dissertations by areas is as follows: Philosophy: 400; History and History of Arts: 253; Philology: 161; Education: 151 (from 1 September 2014, the dissertations in this discipline were transferred to the School of Education and Psychology); Geography: 22 and Humanities: 13.

Of these 1000 PhD dissertations, 300 were carried out by international scholars and 670 by Spanish researchers, 248 of whom were from Navarra. It is a curious fact that if these dissertations were put in a line, the result would be approximately 350 km of text and more than 700,000 sheets of paper.

The present academic year (2015-2016) marks a change in the legal procedure for submission of PhD dissertations. As a result of this change, all the PhD students enrolled before the year 2012-2013 will have to defend their dissertations by February 11. In consequence, the number of PhDs examined during 2015-2016 will reach the unprecedented number of 50.