On 24 March, 2017 Language Teachers’ Association of Lithuania (LKPA) organized the traditional annual event “The Baltic Philologist Coffret” award ceremony to award the members of the association for the most prominent contribution and activities, for fostering and ensuring the continuity of the Baltic culture, promoting multilingualism and multiculturalism in the year of 2016.

Every year in March the Baltic Philologist Coffret is given to meritorious members of the association or organizations in accordance with certain pre-specified criteria. The Baltic philologist is a professional, ethical, and enterprising educator. The Baltic Philologist Coffret is attributed to an educator (or an organization) who is fostering and ensuring the continuity of the Baltic culture.

Institute of Foreign Languages (IFL) of Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) successfully carries out its mission to provide efficient foreign language teaching, offering the broadest range of languages in Lithuania (currently 30 languages on offer), and also to perform research in plurilingual competence development and disseminating the scientific research internationally.

The 4^th biennial international conference “Sustainable Multilingualism”, which was organized by IFL on 26-27 May 2017 (11^th conference of the Lithuanian Language Teachers’ Association, with VMU as one of its founders) rallied over one hundred of researchers and language teaching professionals from over twenty countries of the world for discussion on individual plurilingualism and societal multilingualism in higher education. This year’s conference was exceptional in its focus on language preservation, linguistic human rights, minority language teaching and learning, challenges for culture and identity and continuing discussions on major issues in higher education language policy and language education in multilingual and multicultural learning space.

On January 25, 2017 Language Teachers’ Association of Lithuania (LTAL) together with the Institute of Foreign Languages of Vilnius University (VU) invited language professionals to a workshop on the innovative educational technologies. The participants were introduced to wide possibilities of practical application of Google documents in the study process, learned how to create multimodal teaching and learning content and attractive motivating educational environment for students of the New Generation, and how to make learning activities more innovative and facilitate collaborative learning.

On January 20, 2017 Lithuanian State Language Commission together with the Institute of Foreign Languages of Vilnius University (VU) and Language Teachers’ Association of Lithuania (LTAL) had a round-table discussion “Language Policy in Higher Schools: Objectives, Needs, Benefits.”

The aim of the event was to bring together representatives of Lithuanian institutions of higher education and the Ministry of Education and Science, managers of foreign language institutes, heads of the departments of Lithuanian and other languages, professionals, and anyone interested in issues of language policy in the area of Lithuanian higher education in order to discuss language policy in the area of higher education in Lithuania.

NBR 2016 conference, hosted by The Estonian Association of Foreign Language Teachers, took place in Tallinn from 9 June until 11 June. The conference brought together 130 foreign language teachers from 20 countries: Austria, Australia, Bulgaria, Brazil, Finland, France, Hungary, Germany, Estonia, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovenia and Turkey.