Faculty | SIU

Linguistics

My first introduction to linguistics and TESOL came during my Cambridge CELTA and developed over the next several years as I taught EFL abroad.

This experience led me to pursue my MA in Applied Linguistics at SIUC and then my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Georgia, where my research focused on how people express themselves socially and emotionally through phonetics (i.e., the way the sounds of language are produced and perceived). My current interests include the role of emotion in language and learning in the second language classroom as well as best practices in TESOL composition and grammar.

I have presented my research at a wide variety of conferences including meetings of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society, the Acoustical Society of America, and New Ways of Analyzing Variation. My work on sociophonetic variation has been published in the Journal of English Linguistics, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, and my work on emotion has been published in the journal NeuroImage.