Home Department: English
Associate Director of the Writing Program in the Department of English
SLAT Areas of Specialization: Instructional Dimensions of L2 Learning, Linguistic Dimensions of L2 Learning, Sociocultural Dimensions of L2 Learning, Technology in Second Language Teaching Minor/Certificate
Shelley Staples (PhD in Applied Linguistics, Northern Arizona University, 2014) teaches courses in the undergraduate English program, MA in TESL program, and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching PhD program. Her research focuses on the use of corpus-based discourse analysis (qualitative and quantitative computational text analysis) to investigate language use across spoken and written contexts. The purpose of her research is to understand how linguistic variation is related to situational factors and speaker characteristics, including register, first language, cultural background, and proficiency levels of second language speakers. In addition, her research aims to inform language teaching and assessment, particularly in the areas of English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP), which focus on teaching and learning in specific contexts. Her current projects focus on academic writing and health care communication.
Her publications include a 2015 monograph with John Benjamins, The Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions, a 2016 edited volume with Palgrave titled Talking at Work: Corpus-based Explorations of Workplace Discourse, and a 2021 co-authored book from Routledge, The Register-Functional Approach to Grammatical Complexity. Her journal articles can be found in such publications as Applied Linguistics, TESOL Quarterly, Journal of Second Language Writing, English for Specific Purposes, and English for Academic Purposes. She is the PI of two learner corpus projects, the Corpus and Repository of Writing (Crow) and Multilingual Corpus of Assignments—Writing and Speech (MACAWS).