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Professor of Second Language Acquisition, University of Essex

Florence Myles was born in France and graduated from the University of Sheffield with a PhD in Second Language Acquisition. She worked at the University of Southampton before taking up a Chair in French Linguistics at Newcastle University in 2004, where she was founding Director of the Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences. She joined the University of Essex in 2011 as Professor of Second Language Acquisition.

Her research interests are in second language acquisition (SLA), especially of French although she has also worked on Spanish SLA, and she is particularly interested in morphosyntactic development, and in theory building in the field of SLA. She has directed many research projects funded by the ESRC, AHRC and the British Academy, which have all had the dual aim of investigating learner development in French/Spanish and of constructing an electronic database of French/Spanish learner language oral corpora, available on the web to the research community (www.flloc.soton.ac.uk; www.splloc.soton.ac.uk). She has recently directed an ESRC-funded project investigating the role of age in instructed SLA of French (2009-11).

She was President of the Association for French Language Studies (2003-7), and is currently President of EUROSLA (European Second Language Association). She was Editor of the Journal of French Language Studies (CUP) until 2012, and on the Editorial Board of Second Language Research, of Language Teaching, of the EUROSLA Yearbook, and of the Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée. She is co-author (with R. Mitchell and E. Marsdsen) of Second Language Learning Theories, now in its 3rd edition.

Experience

  • –present
    Professor of Second Language Acquisition, University of Essex