Contact
Biography
I am the deputy head of the Centre for English Language Education (CELE - School of Education), where I oversee the credit-bearing modules and facilitate the development and implementation of the Centre's strategic plan and related projects and represent the Centre on a number of committees.
I hold a PhD in Translation Studies (with a focus on translation pedagogy), a German Diplom (MA) in Southeast Asian Studies (incl. Translation), an MA in Applied Linguistics & ELT and a PGCert in Teaching English for Academic Purposes. I am also Senior Fellow of Advance HE.
Expertise Summary
I have many years of experience working internationally in different cultural contexts (Asia and Europe). Apart from language teaching and materials review and development, I have experience in project development and coordination of educational and non-educational projects. Before going into teaching, I was a Strategic Planner, and worked with a number of governmental, non-governmental and educational bodies in Southeast Asia. I have further been trained in translation.
Teaching Summary
I convene and teach two MA modules for students of Chinese English Translation and Interpreting and Translation Studies. In this area my main interest is the pragmatics of the translation profession… read more
Research Summary
I currently have two main areas of research interest. One is translation pedagogy, and the other one is the use of machine translation in Higher Education.
For translation pedagogy, I am specifically researching pedagogical implications of learning/teaching the translation of cultural items, including so-called 'untranslatables'. I am conducting an action research project with that focus, which weill feed into theoretical implications as well as practical suggestions on how to approach this difficult area of translation in the classroom.
Regarding machine translation in Higher Education, my research has so far focussed the abilities of online translation tools and pedagogical as well as HE policy academic integrity implications of student use of machine translation, e.g. to help them with reading sources or producing texts in a second language
I convene and teach two MA modules for students of Chinese English Translation and Interpreting and Translation Studies. In this area my main interest is the pragmatics of the translation profession - i.e. the processes and products of translation - and cultural translation.
I further teach on the PGCHE and am a dissertation supervisor on MA programmes in the School of Education.
My main interest in teaching EAP on the ALACS programme is genre- and register-based language analysis and application, including subject-specific language. Further, I like to work on materials development and related studies such as genre and discourse analysis.
Past Research
Past research areas include English written academic communicative competence of Malay L1 speakers, genre and register research for English for Specific Academic Purposes (i.e. discipline-specific language use) and corpus analysis for the development of teaching materials.