Academic Bio

Agnieszka Marciszewska is a highly educated and distinguished linguist with over 10 years’ experience studying and teaching language. She is a PhD Candidate on a Vice Chancellor scholarship at the Department of Languages, Literature and Theatre at Greenwich University in London.

In 2004 she graduated from University of Szczecin, Poland, with a Bachelor’s Degree in English Philology with Applied Linguistics as her specialisation. Multilingualism has sparked her interest in 2001 and her thesis was a study in the field of multilingualism and mnemonics. She tackled the issue from the perspective of using L1-L4 in the acquisition of new lexical items in L5. The qualitative research was a case study on a multilingual subject (with Ukrainian, Russian, English and Polish as L1-L4 respectively) who was learning new vocabulary in German (L5) with the use of mnemonics. The study was designed to test which languages helped her associate the new words in the learning process, which language groups they fell into and how it affected her retention.

She further graduated from two highly-ranked UK universities with postgraduate degrees. The M.A. degree in Bilingual Translation helped her deepen the knowledge of a variety of academic discourses and issues around language transfer. In her postgraduate certificate in linguistics at the University of Nottingham she was studying primarily the relationship between language and gender.

Furthermore, she has gained a QTS in the field of Teaching English and has taken part in a number of CPD courses including teaching and examining IELTS as well as Cambridge academic suite courses. In 2014 she received a Certificate in Teaching English for Academic Purposes from School for Oriental and African Studies, University of London, a course taken specifically to learn to develop materials for the purpose of teaching multilingual and multicultural students of academic English.

Her lecturing experience includes teaching pre-sessional and in-sessional courses called English Language for Academic Studies (ELAS) at SOAS. The purpose of these courses is to prepare students for the academic challenges and expectations at a British university. In the course of the term students take two modules in which they are taught listening/speaking and reading/writing. The focus of these classes is respectively improving note-taking skills for lectures, giving presentations, practising seminar communication skills and extended oral interactions as well as understanding academic writing genres, improving reading efficiency, writing abstracts and academic discursive essays and other academic, language and study skills.

Currently, Agnieszka is continuing her research in the area of language typology structural proximity affecting language acquisition, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and multi-competencies in third language acquisition with the focus on grammatical input. Her PhD study, which is supervised by Professor Alessandro Benati, is entitled Processing grammatical input: differences between second (L2) and third language (L3) learners of German.

She is a member of CAROLE at Greenwich University – please find the link here.