Researcher biography

My academic training is in language teaching and linguistics. I hold a BA/MA equivalent in Teaching Foreign Languages from Ryazan State Pedagogical University, Russia, MA in English with concentration in Linguistics and TESOL from East Carolina University, USA, and PhD in Linguistics from University of South Carolina. Before coming to UQ, I taught at tertiary level for 13 in three universities in Russia and USA. I have supervised teaching practicums and research projects at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and have taught a range of Russian, English, Linguistics and Language Teaching courses.

My research interests lie at the intersection of Bilingualism, Second Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching. I am interested in cognitive, social and pedagogical implications of bilingualism in its broad sense and specifically in the similarities and differences between language development in foreign/second language learners and heritage speakers. I am interested in finding which linguistic phenomena are more difficult to acquire and why. I study factors that can potentially affect the success of bilingual language acquisition. The broad goal of my research is to gain a better understanding of how language works in the case of bilingual acquisition and, as a result, to inform classroom language pedagogy and policy.