About
Federica specializes in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and classroom discourse. Her research applies corpus-based methods to large corpora of spoken discourse to investigate lexico-grammatical variation and change, discourse-pragmatic variation, and register variation. She is particularly interested in interpersonal aspects of language in institutional (spoken) registers. Within sociolinguistics, she has done extensive work on quotative verbs and general extenders; within discourse analysis, she has investigated the linguistic marking of ‘involvement’ in American university classroom discourse. She also has long-standing interests in corpus-based materials design and the interfaces of corpus linguistics and language teaching and acquisition research.
She has presented at conferences across the United States and Europe, and her work appears in several leading journals, including Journal of English Linguistics, Journal of Sociolinguistics, English World Wide, Applied Linguistics, Language Teaching Research, and English for Specific Purposes.
Prior to joining Swansea in 2012, Federica held teaching positions at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Reading, where she taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in linguistics and applied linguistics.
Federica holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University, an MA in TESL/Applied Linguistics from Iowa State University, and an MA in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the Catholic University of Milan. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Since 2014 she has been Programme Director of the MA TESOL.