Profile
Biography
Elinor joined the Department of Language and Linguistic Science in 2016 and is currently teaching LFA German. She completed her BA in German and French and Master's in German at California State University, Long Beach (USA). After moving to the UK she taught German and Italian at Leeds Beckett University and later undertook her PhD on a university scholarship at the University of Hull. Her doctoral research investigated the implications of the separation between language and content in Modern Language degrees on students' development of intercultural competence and criticality. This was a comparative US - UK study comprising four German departments, two in the UK and two in the USA.
From 2018, Elinor has also worked for the University of Manchester as a Tutor of German, where she teaches both on the degree programme and on LEAP courses. She is also a certified GOETHE examiner.
Publications & Conferences
Publications
Parks, E. (2020) Developing Critical Cultural Awareness in Modern Languages: A Comparative Study of Higher Education in North America and the United Kingdom, New York: Routledge.
https://www.routledge.com/Developing-Critical-Cultural-Awareness-in-Modern-Languages-A-Comparative/Parks/p/book/9780367357085
Parks, E. (2019) The separation between language and content in Modern Language degrees: implications for students’ development of critical cultural awareness and criticality, Language and Intercultural Communication, 20:1, 22-36.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2019.1679161
Parks, E. (2018) Communicative criticality and savoir se reconnaître: emerging new competencies of criticality and intercultural communicative competence, Language and Intercultural Communication, 18:1, 107-124.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2017.1401691
Parks, E. (2017) Content modules in UK and US universities – their unique contribution towards
the development of intercultural competence and criticality . In C. Álvarez-Mayo, A. Gallagher-Brett, & F. Michel (Eds), Innovative language teaching and learning at university: enhancing employability (pp. 1-8). Research-publishing.net.
https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2017.innoconf2016.655
Invited Talks and Conferences
17 February 2021 - York St. John University - Invited as a Guest Speaker; Online Languages and Linguistics Student Colloquium Series
2 December 2020 - University of Warwick - Invited as a Guest Speaker; Online Seminar series at Warwick Applied Linguistics
9-10 January 2020 - Maynooth - ‘The CEFR, Assessment and Language Learning’ 21st AULC Annual Conference. An event hosted by the University of Maynooth, Ireland. Critical cultural awareness and criticality in Modern Languages – Insights from a US-UK comparative study
5 December 2019 - University of Manchester - Invited as a Guest Speaker for the Introduction to Intercultural Communication (MA module)
28 June 2019 - Southampton - ‘Treasuring languages: innovative and creative approaches in HE’. 9th Annual Conference. An event hosted by the University of Southampton. Developing critical cultural awareness and criticality in Modern Languages – Insights from a US-UK comparative study.
29-31 August 2018 – Helsinki - ‘The good interculturalist’ IALIC Annual Conference. Communicative criticality and savoir se reconnaître: emerging new competencies of a ‘good’ interculturalist
