Dr. phil. habil. Milene Oliveira
Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics & Intercultural Communication
Welcome to my website! Here you’ll find information about my past and current research activities, publications, some media content, and future conferences.
If you would like to contact me directly, please use the contact form on this website. You are also welcome to connect via ResearchGate or LinkedIn.
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About Me
Applied linguistics, Sociolinguistics & Intercultural Communication
My work explores how people communicate across cultures and languages, especially in digital spaces like games, video calls, and social media. I'm particularly interested in how language use and intercultural configurations shape interaction and identity in these environments. I combine methods from interactional sociolinguistics and applied linguistics to study the everyday, often improvised ways people navigate intercultural communication online. One of my key projects involved bringing together students from various countries to play an intercultural game over Zoom. By analyzing their communication, I looked at how playful interaction can foster intercultural competence—and how language works as both a bridge and a boundary.
Currently, I’m a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University. In 2024, I was Guest Professor of Media, Communication, and Culture at European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), and from 2020–2024, I held a postdoctoral position at the University of Potsdam, where I was Principal Investigator in the sub-project Digital Communities and Online Intercultural Competence within the third-party funded consortium ReDICo – Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively.
My research interests include:
· Digital and intercultural communication
· English as a lingua franca
· Foreign language education
· Business and professional communication
My Research Projects
ReDICo: Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively
2020-2024
The group’s work centered upon the research and analysis of intercultural practices and discourses within digital spaces. My ReDICo sub-project focuses on intercultural games. I was interested in the interplay of practices and ideologies in this kind of intercultural intervention. Check out my latest publications on this website.
Multilingualism and multimodality
2019-2020
In connection to the project “Intercultural Communication in Interaction: multimodal approaches” (headed by Ulrike Schröder and funded by the WUN foundation), my colleague Adriana Barbosa Fernandes and I conducted a study on how in-service and pre-service teachers position themselves in relation to their foreign-language teaching and learning experiences and how they negotiate their identities as (future) teachers in a focus-group discussion. Our analysis, based on positioning theory and gesture studies, revealed a certain tension between current trends and more traditional discourses in the field of English teaching. The link to the pre-print can be found on this website.
Babbel study: Learners’ perceptions of a virtual-classroom system
2019-2020
In 2019 I engaged in a collaboration with the language learning company Babbel. After months of conversation aiming at getting a deep understanding of their products and didactic strategies, I proposed a study on their virtual-classroom solution to business professionals "Babbel Intensive." The project was very fulfilling in a number of ways. For example, I was able to involve students from the University of Potsdam in the project who participated in data collection and analysis. Moreover, these students and I profited from close interaction with Babbel which taught us the benefits of combining the theoretical knowledge acquired at the university with the development of user-centered language-learning solutions. The results of this project were published in the Computer Assisted Language Learning journal.
