Background and experience
• 1999–2003: Doctoral Research Fellow (funded by the Research Council of Norway's Programme for Cultural Studies), Department of English, University of Bergen
• 2003–2006: Postdoctoral Research Fellow (funded by the Research Council of Norway's Programme for Cultural Research), Department of English, Agder University College
• 2006–2008: Associate Professor of English and Norwegian (including Norwegian as a second language), Faculty of Technology and Science, University of Agder
• 2009-2014: Associate Professor, Department of Nordic and Media Studies, University of Agder (part-time)
• 2009-2014: Researcher, Department of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, Sørlandet Hospital (part-time)
• 2015-present: Professor of English Linguistics and Language Didactics (Associate Professor 2015–2021), Department of Foreign Languages and Translation, University of Agder
Areas of responsibility
I am a Professor of English linguistics and language didactics at the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation. I teach and supervise at all levels within both disciplinary studies and teacher education programmes. The main focus of my work is English teacher education, where I have extensive experience teaching and supervising in primary and secondary teacher education (GLU1–7, GLU5–10 and ‘lektor’ 8-13), as well as in continuing and further education programmes (‘etter- og videreutdanning’).
I am a member of the research group Multilingualism in Society and Education (MUSE) (Faculty of Humanities and Education, UiA). My research is grounded in applied linguistics, with a particular interest in language variation across contexts, ranging from everyday interaction to institutional and educational settings. I frequently employ corpus-based and contrastive approaches to language use, combining perspectives from pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis. I have extensive experience with corpus building and corpus analysis, from COLT/BNC and UNO in the 1990s and 2000s to TRAWL and PLIS in the 2010s and 2020s.
Teaching
I teach and supervise within the following areas:
• English linguistics: grammar, phonetics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis
• English language didactics; English as a second/foreign language (L2)
• Writing in English as an L2
• Multilingualism and writing across languages and genres in school (L1 Norwegian, L2 English, and L3 French, Spanish, and German)
• Language and conflict, restorative conflict practices, and preventive mental health work in schools
Research
Research interests
Within the overarching perspective of Language variation across contexts, my research can be divided into three main areas:
• Informal spoken language and youth language: Studies of slang, swearing, discourse markers and loanwords, based on corpus data (particularly COLT/BNC, UNO and PLIS) and contrastive analyses, mainly focusing on English and Norwegian.
• Language, conflict, and mental health: Analysis of communication in conflict situations in both everyday and institutional contexts, with a particular focus on restorative conflict practices (e.g. mediation services ‘Konfliktråd’ and school mediation) and preventive mental health work in schools and kindergartens.
• Language didactics, learner writing, and multilingualism: Corpus-based studies (TRAWL) of Norwegian students’ writing development across genres and formal/informal contexts, and across the language subjects L1 Norwegian, L2 English, and L3 French, Spanish, and German.
Selected projects (ongoing and completed)
• WRITE! Writing Across Genres and Languages in School – a research project under development within the research group Multilingualism in Society and Education (MUSE) (Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of Agder).
• TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) – a longitudinal corpus project investigating student writing in L1 Norwegian, L2 English, and L3 French, Spanish, and German (University of Oslo, University of Agder, University of Inland Norway, Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
• MULTIWRITE – Interactions Between First, Second and Third Languages (2021–2026) – Research Council of Norway project on students’ writing development in L1 Norwegian, L2 English, and L3 French, Spanish, and German (University of Oslo, University of Bergen, University of Agder, University of Exeter).
• PLIS – A Comparative Study of Pragmatic Borrowings in the Nordic Languages (2024-2026) - a Nordplus Nordic Languages project on English loanwords in informal podcast conversations, based on corpus data from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland (Finnish and Finland-Swedish), and Iceland (University of Helsinki).
• Brave at heart! (‘Mot i brystet!’) (2010-2013) - a praxis-oriented R&D project on restorative conflict practices and preventive mental health work in Norwegian kindergartens (Sørlandet Hospital and the Municipality of Kristiansand).