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Following completion of the CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) in 2000, I spent 10 years teaching English to children, teenagers and adults in Portugal. Whilst working at the British Council Lisbon (2005-2010), I became coordinator of the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) courses for professionals and taught EAP (English for Academic Purposes) at two different major universities. Since returning to the UK in 2010, I have worked as an English Language lecturer at several universities, including Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Huddersfield.

To complement the PGCE in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) gained from the University of Huddersfield (2005), I opted for an MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, graduating with distinction in 2013. During the MA, I developed a particular interest in Conversation Analysis, especially when applied to education and healthcare contexts. I was attracted by how it ‘forced’ me to look at the nuts and bolts of interaction, and by doing so I seemed to uncover new aspects of the interaction that I perhaps wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

For my dissertation, I adopted a mixed-method approach, combining Corpus Linguistics and Conversation Analysis, to investigate the frequency and function of laughter episodes in ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) in university seminars, with a view to determining the need for intercultural pragmatic sessions for international students.