| Position in department | Disability Liaison Officer |
| Staff position | Lecturer |
| E-mail | sskouf (non Essex users should add @essex.ac.uk) |
| Telephone | 3754 (non Essex users should add 01206-87 to the beginning of this number) |
| Fax | 2198 |
| Room | 4.123 |
| Office hours | Summer term: Wednesday @ 10:00-12:00
NB: On week 31 (which starts on 29 April), office hours will be 12:30-14:30 instead. |
| Biography | Sophia did her undergraduate studies in English at the University of Athens, Greece. She then did an MPhil and a PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Essex, she worked as a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Greenwich and the Open University in the UK. She also conducted postdoctoral research on English learner corpus data at National Taiwan University. Between her degrees she worked as an English language teacher in Athens and in Cambridge and as an item writer for ASSET Languages, a language testing company in Cambridge.
Her main research interest is the learning, teaching, and use of vocabulary in a second language. In her PhD research, she examined the comprehension, learning and teaching of English idiomatic expressions. While working as a postdoctoral researcher, she examined the role of vocabulary in second language oral fluency and writing quality. Her postdoctoral research is related to language testing because the data examined were past answers to a local proficiency examination.
Sophia's other research interests are the comprehension of figurative language during reading and how people come to perceive a text as coherent or not. |
| Qualifications | BA Athens, MPhil Cambridge, PhD Cambridge |
| Research interests | Second language vocabulary learning, teaching, and use
Figurative language processing
Second language writing
Language testing
Discourse processing |
| Teaching responsibilities | LG428-6-SP-Second Language Vocabulary: Learning, Teaching and Use
LG428-7-SP-Second Language Vocabulary: Learning, Teaching and Use
LG675-7-SP-Research Methods II
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| Publications | Skoufaki, S. (forthcoming) Guessing at the meaning of unknown L2 idioms: Theoretical and Applied (Cognitive) Linguistic Perspectives. In Juchem-Grundmann, C. and Niemeier, S. (eds.) Knowing is Seeing: Metaphor and Language Pedagogy. Mouton de Gruyter.
Skoufaki, S. (forthcoming) Reassessing the effectiveness of L2 idiom presentation in metaphoric groups. In Aldridge, S. and Luchjenbroers, J. (eds.) Conceptual Structure and Linguistics Research. Vol. 2: Cognitive Linguistics Applied across Contexts of Use. John Benjamins.
Huang, C.-R., Cheng, W., Cheung, H., Harada, Y., Hong, Y., Skoufaki, S., and Chen, H.K.Y. (2010) English Learner Corpus: Global Perspectives with an Asian Focus. In Kao, T.-E. and Lin, Y. (eds.) A New Look at Language Testing and Teaching: English as Subject and Vehicle. Taipei: Language Training and Testing Center, pp. 85-117.
Skoufaki, S. (2009) An exploratory application of Rhetorical Structure Theory to detect coherence errors in L2 English writing: possible implications for Automated Writing Evaluation software. International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing (Special Issue on Computer Assisted Language Learning; Liu, C.L. and Gao, Z.-M. guests eds.) 14(2), 181-203.
Skoufaki, S. (2008) Investigating the source of idiom transparency intuitions. Metaphor and Symbol 24(1), 20-41.
Skoufaki, S. (2008) Conceptual metaphoric meaning clues in two L2 idiom presentation methods. In Boers, F. and Lindstromberg, S. (eds.) Cognitive linguistic approaches to teaching vocabulary and phraseology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 101-132. |