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Before joining the Department of Education in September 2011, I spent eight years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in the Language Acquisition Group, firstly on a project funded by the Dutch Science Foundation on acquisition and processing in bilingual and multilingual speakers, then later in project on acquisition and information structure. Prior to that, I worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Essex in the Department of Languages and Linguistics on a Leverhulme-funded project comparing real-time language processing of child and adult learners.
I obtained my first degree from the University of East London in 1997 in Linguistics with Education Studies, and did my post-graduate studies at the University of Essex, obtaining an MA in Language Acquisition in 1999 and a PhD on syntactic processing in second language learners in in 2003.
The focus of my research is in second language learning and processing at the word-, sentence- and discourse-levels. Recent research topics include what adult and child learners can acquire (in and out of the classroom environment) after only a small amount of exposure to a brand new language, and at the other end of the proficiency-continuum, how two languages interact in the mind of functionally bilingual speakers during real-time language comprehension.
*** I am interested in supervising research students in any of the following areas: second language/bilingual grammatical/discourse processing and acquisition, cross-linguistic influences in SLA, classroom intervention studies on language learning of grammar/discourse, naturalistic and/or classroom-based first exposure to a new language ***
I teach on the following MA modules in the department:
As well as collaborating with many colleagues within the Department of Education and other departments at the University of York, my collaborators include:
View all of our current available PhD research projects.
I am Managing Editor of the EUROSLA Yearbook and Co-Editor of the journal International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL). I am on the editorial boards of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, the EUROSLA Monograph Series, and Theory and Practice in Language Studies (TPLS).