How do university students learn English academic words? What do they know about polysemous English academic words? How do English language teachers assess their students’ writing for coherence? These questions are the main impetus of my current research.

Work

I am an applied linguist specializing in second-language vocabulary studies. My secondary research focus is on how readers come to perceive a text as coherent or not.

I work as an Associate Supervisor in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, UK. I previously worked as a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the same university. I am also the External Examiner for the MA Applied Linguistics course at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.

Before joining the University of Essex, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at National Taiwan University. I was a member of the team which created and conducted research on the LTTC English Learner Corpus.  Previously, I designed and taught theoretical and applied linguistics courses first as a Visiting Lecturer and then as a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Greenwich. I have taught blended-learning courses in linguistics and other social sciences as an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.

Between my MPhil and PhD studies I worked as an English language teacher in Athens, Greece. During my PhD studies I worked as an English language teacher in Cambridge, UK. I also worked as an item writer for ASSET Languages, a former language testing company in Cambridge.

I am on the Editorial Board of Frontiers in Education and Frontiers in Psychology. I am a member of the Oxford English Dictionary Researchers Advisory Group. I am also a member of the Newsletter committee of the English Language Testing Society.

Studies

I did my undergraduate studies in English Studies (i.e., English Literature and Linguistics) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. I then did my postgraduate studies (MPhil, PhD) in Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. My PhD thesis examined the comprehension, learning and teaching of English idiomatic expressions from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective.