I work in the fields of Education, Language Education, and English Language Learning and Teaching (e.g. ELT, ESOL, TESOL, EAL, EAP), researching the socially embedded nature of language learning in diverse educational contexts. Conceptually, I am interested in the dialogic construction of knowledge, positionality, and interaction in multilingual contexts. I engage methodological approaches from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to explore language in use.

My interests in the dialogic nature of language and the need for context-sensitive language education are borne from my experiences of teaching in a range of multilingual/plurilingual educational contexts. I have been involved in large-scale educational research projects conducting national and international research across multiple sites with young people and practitioners. I have designed, constructed, and researched a number of specialized spoken academic and learner corpora (digital textual datasets) using corpus linguistics methodologies to investigate interaction in classroom contexts. I have also led small-scale research projects and community partnership projects to develop evidence-informed insights on language education and social issues of migration, inequalities, and gender empowerment.

I teach postgraduate modules on the MSc in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. I also teach a PGCE Elective module on Teaching Linguistically Diverse Students. I co-teach an Open Learning course on Teaching English for Refugees, Migrants, and Asylum-Seekers.

I supervise doctoral students in the following areas: English for Academic Purposes (EAP);  Community-based language education; Speaking Skills in EAL; English Language Learning and Resilience; Multimodality in School English Language Teaching

QUB Teaching Award for Sustained Excellence (2014)

Current leadership role: Director, Centre for Language Education Research

Previous leadership roles: MSc TESOL Course Director (2006-2017); Professional Doctorate in Education EdD Course Director (2012-2016); Director of Internationalization (2018-2022)