I work at the Centre for Multilingual Academic communication (Movi), where I am mainly responsible for teaching doctoral modules, international master’s courses, and UVK courses (for a list of course descriptions, see below). I also screen incoming PhD researchers and carry our exemption exams.
Current courses and duties:
Doctoral modules
Academic article: Coherent sections
This course aims at increasing participants’ awareness of the most common organisational principles of research articles, whilst also addressing variations across different disciplines and journal requirements. Discourse-analytical models are applied to individual sections to analyse underlying rhetorical structures, thus helping doctoral researchers to improve their own writing. Participants are to receive peer and instructor feedback.
Conference abstracts
Attending conferences provides researchers at all stages with the unique opportunity to share their own research—and to interact and network with others. Finding the most suitable conference and writing a successful abstract are crucial first steps in this process. The aim of this course is to support doctoral researchers in this endeavour.
Conference posters
Poster presentations represent an interactive and visual way of showcasing research at conferences. Generally less formal than traditional presentations, they allow for opportunities to engage with other conference attendees in a low-pressure, feedback-conducive environment. In this course we examine effective examples of conference posters. Participants are to learn how to create and present a poster based on their own research.
Conference presentations
Presenting at conferences constitutes an invaluable opportunity for doctoral researchers at all stages to communicate their research. Lately, a variety of new presentation formats, including work-in-progress papers (WIPs), lightning papers, and online presentations, have gained in popularity. This course helps PhD researchers to plan, prepare, and deliver the presentation of their choice, including traditional conference presentations. Participants are given the opportunity to provide and receive peer feedback.
Grant writing
This course is aimed at familiarising participants with the requirements of research grant proposals. The main focus is on writing a competitive research proposal and an academic CV in English. Participants will learn how to identify the key funding bodies in their respective fields of inquiry, and to adjust their application to match the interests of grant giving institutions. Special attention will be given to genre- and target-audience-specific writing.
Master-level course
Integrated Research Communication
The course is integrated into some of JYU's English-medium master’s degree programmes. It aims at developing participants’ academic literacies for learning through English, while increasing their awareness of the benefits of a process-based approach to academic writing. Key themes include information search and management, critical reading and writing, and academic standards and field-specific conventions in written and oral academic communication. The course provides support for reporting research in various oral and written forms and in writing the master’s thesis.
BA-level course:
Academic Literacy and Multilingual interaction courses for the OKL programme.
Job duties:
Academic readiness screening for incoming PhD researchers
The project I am currently working on investigates teachers’ perceptions of translanguaging—drawing on a speaker’s entire linguistic repertoire—as an educational strategy. Whereas previously languages used to be strictly kept apart in language classes, students are now encouraged to fulfill course objectives by using all the languages they know. The focus is an educating academic, not linguistic experts. Languages are seen as a tool to address this newly identified educational goal. My research explores teachers’ in-class approaches to, and their general and pedagogical perceptions of, translanguaging.
I also study language socialisation, specifically second-language acquisition and second-language (L2) identity development in the context of study abroad. Here, my research seeks broadly to identify the most hospitable conditions for pragmalinguistic development in study-abroad settings. My current focus is on how students’ formulations of requests change over time, and whether factors such as the successful establishment of an identity specific to the target language may influence the formulation of more native-like patterns.