Ellen Smith

Ellen Smith graduated in 2007 with a first class B.A. (Hons) in English and Linguistics from the University of Manchester. Her undergraduate dissertation investigated bilingualism and analysed the speech of a bilingual child, examining the extent to which their speech was affected by having acquired two languages simultaneously.

Ellen continued her studies at the University of Manchester and gained a distinction in her M.A. in Languages and Linguistics in 2008. Her M.A. dissertation investigated individual variation in syntactic development in the interlanguage systems of children and adolescents acquiring English as a second language.

Having spent time teaching English as a foreign language in Brazil and England prior to and during her undergraduate studies, Ellen decided to gain further teaching experience and went on to teach English in Portugal and Indonesia. She is now undertaking a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Newcastle Australia, having secured a fully funded position to document the highly endangered language Papapana in Papua New Guinea (funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project).

Her research interests include bilingualism, contact languages, language death, first and second language acquisition, aphasia and cross-cultural pragmatics.