Bridging Scholarship and Classroom: Insights from a Linguist and Language Coordinator

Dr Valentina Concu is Lecturer and Language Coordinator for Italian at Leuphana University (Germany) and Regional Representative for South and Southeast Europe. She completed her PhD in Linguistics at Purdue University (USA). Her research spans phonetics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics, with a particular focus on interpersonal meaning, mitigation, and the temporal organization of speech. She has published in journals including Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, European Journal of Applied Linguistics, and Journal of Pragmatics. She is currently working on diachronic speech acts in German and conducting classroom-based research on oral fluency development in Italian as a foreign language. Across her research and leadership roles, she is particularly interested in bridging theoretical linguistics with pedagogical innovation.

Could you reflect on your academic and professional journey, and how you came to combine linguistic research with programme coordination and leadership responsibilities?

My academic trajectory has been shaped by three formative institutional contexts. At Purdue University (Indiana, USA), where I completed my PhD, I developed my identity as a researcher. The intellectual rigor, methodological precision, and emphasis on theoretical grounding there profoundly influenced my approach to linguistics. It was during that period that I learned to treat language not merely as a system of forms, but as a structured, analyzable phenomenon embedded in social interaction and historical development.

My subsequent time at Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla, Colombia) marked a different but equally decisive phase. There, I took on my first coordination role (for German and Italian) and began to understand how leadership, curriculum design, and research could interact. That experience pushed me to articulate a professional identity in which teaching, coordination, and empirical inquiry were not separate domains but mutually reinforcing ones. I realized that I could not meaningfully detach one from the others.

As Language Coordinator for Italian, how do you balance administrative leadership with research and classroom engagement?

At Leuphana University (Lüneburg, Germany), I have been able to further consolidate this integrated model. The institutional framework supports research-informed teaching and allows classroom-based empirical work to be conducted rigorously. In my current role as Lecturer and Language Coordinator for Italian, I see coordination not as administrative detachment but as an extension of scholarship. Curriculum development, placement systems, and methodological innovation are, in my view, applied linguistics in action.

In your view, what responsibilities do language coordinators hold in shaping curriculum quality and pedagogical innovation?

I am fully aware that combining leadership, teaching, and research is challenging. It requires constant recalibration and intellectual discipline. Yet I cannot imagine practicing linguistics without engaging all three dimensions. Each informs and sharpens the others.

Your research spans phonetics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics. How do these fields intersect within your broader scholarly framework?

My research brings together phonetics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics, with a particular interest in how interpersonal meaning is structured and reshaped over time. Combining historical linguistics and pragmatics allows me to investigate how relational strategies, such as mitigation, stance marking, or forms of address, become conventionalized within communities. Diachronic perspectives remind us that pragmatic norms are neither fixed nor universal; they are historically sedimented patterns of interaction.

Having published in leading journals such as Intercultural Pragmatics and Journal of Politeness Research, how has your work in pragmatics informed your approach to communicative language teaching?

Research in pragmatics has significantly influenced my approach to communicative language teaching. It has reinforced the importance of relational work, stance-taking, and context-sensitive interpretation. Language teaching should not focus exclusively on grammatical accuracy but also on the pragmatic appropriateness of linguistic choices. Communicative competence includes understanding how power, distance, and politeness, are encoded linguistically.

One persistent gap in traditional language textbooks concerns speech acts. While learners are trained extensively in morphology and syntax, they often receive limited systematic instruction on how to apologize, mitigate disagreement, soften claims, or manage interpersonal alignment. Yet these linguistic behaviors constitute a substantial portion of everyday communication. The cultural sensibility embedded in them, what counts as appropriate apology, sufficient mitigation, or respectful disagreement, varies significantly across languages.

What challenges arise when translating insights from historical linguistics and pragmatics into classroom practice?

 My multilingual background has further shaped this perspective. Working across Italian, English, Spanish, and German, I have repeatedly observed how pragmatic strategies do not map neatly across languages. For example, while teaching in the Master’s program in EFL at Universidad del Norte, I encouraged some of my students to design lesson plans centered on apologies. They quickly discovered that apology strategies in English diverge in subtle but important ways from those in Spanish, particularly in terms of mitigation and responsibility-taking. Such contrasts make visible how deeply culture and pragmatics intertwine.

 In my recent co-authored publication in the Journal of Pragmatics, we examine the English construction “it seems” and its interaction with mitigation. What appears to be a simple epistemic marker can function as a nuanced resource for managing stance, softening claims, and negotiating interpersonal alignment. For teachers of EFL, this has direct pedagogical implications. Learners are often taught epistemic adverbs and modal verbs, yet the interpersonal work performed by constructions such as “it seems” is rarely made explicit. Raising awareness of how such forms modulate commitment and politeness can strengthen learners’ pragmatic competence, particularly in academic and professional communication.

You are currently leading a classroom-based study on oral fluency development among A2-level learners. What motivated this research focus?

My current classroom-based study on oral fluency development among A2-level learners emerged from both classroom observation and sustained engagement with research on repeated read-aloud interventions and longitudinal fluency development. Existing scholarship has demonstrated the effectiveness of repeated reading in several target languages, yet Italian remains comparatively under researched in this domain. Extending this line of inquiry to Italian, which is also my first language, allows me to contribute to a broader understanding of fluency development across linguistic contexts.

How do you conceptualise oral fluency beyond speed and accuracy, particularly at lower proficiency levels?

The institutional flexibility to implement longitudinal projects across a semester has been crucial. Leuphana encourages research-informed teaching, which made it possible to integrate systematic data collection into regular coursework rather than treating research and instruction as separate spheres. Such a project requires more than individual initiative; it depends on institutional trust and infrastructural reliability. Access to acoustic analysis software, research ethics frameworks, secure data storage, and interdisciplinary exchange all contribute to making classroom-based empirical work viable and methodologically sound.

What preliminary insights have emerged from your study regarding effective fluency-building practices?

I conceptualize oral fluency as a multidimensional construct that extends beyond speed and grammatical accuracy. It includes temporal organization, pause placement, and articulatory stability. Particularly at lower proficiency levels, fluency development involves restructuring how speech is temporally encoded rather than simply increasing rate of production. Working within an academic environment that values empirical precision allows these conceptualizations to be operationalized rigorously rather than impressionistically.

You regularly integrate acoustic analysis and corpus-based methods into your teaching and research. How do these methodologies enrich both learner awareness and empirical investigation?

I regularly integrate acoustic analysis and corpus-based methods into both my teaching and research because they render linguistic phenomena observable. In research contexts, acoustic tools allow for fine-grained analysis of temporal features such as pause placement or aspiration patterns. In the classroom, these same tools transform abstract phonetic descriptions into visible structures. When learners examine their own waveforms or compare recordings with native-speaker models, they begin to perceive speech as temporally organized rather than simply “fluent” or “disfluent.” This continuity between empirical investigation and pedagogical practice strengthens both domains.

What role do data-driven approaches play in fostering learner autonomy and metalinguistic awareness?

Data-driven approaches also shift the learner’s role. Instead of relying exclusively on external correction, students gain tools to observe and interpret their own production. I believe this fosters a stronger sense of control over the learning process. When learners can see how pause distribution, articulation, or rhythm affects intelligibility and fluency, they become active participants in diagnosis and adjustment. Such metalinguistic awareness supports autonomy and encourages reflective learning.

How can technology-supported linguistic analysis be made accessible and pedagogically meaningful in everyday classrooms?

Making technology-supported linguistic analysis accessible requires careful scaffolding. The objective is not to transform language classrooms into technical laboratories, but to introduce analytical tools gradually and link them to clear communicative goals. When technology functions as a reflective instrument rather than a purely corrective mechanism, it enhances engagement and deepens understanding without overwhelming learners.

As Regional Representative for South and Southeast Europe, how do you perceive current trends and challenges in language education across the region?

As Regional Representative for South and Southeast Europe, my role involves fostering academic partnerships, supporting mobility initiatives, and facilitating institutional cooperation across universities in the region. This includes engagement with international offices, faculty networks, and language programs. In Germany, such roles are structurally embedded within university internationalization strategies and function as bridges between academic communities.

What emerging research directions in applied linguistics or phonetics do you find particularly promising?

Regarding emerging research directions, I would be cautious about generalizing across the entire region, as research priorities differ substantially between institutions. From my perspective, one particularly promising methodological direction lies in combining classroom-based intervention studies with fine-grained analysis of temporal and articulatory features of speech.Fluency research has long emphasized speed and comprehension, yet more recent work increasingly highlights the importance of temporal organization, pause distribution, and rhythmic structuring. Extending these approaches into longitudinal classroom contexts — particularly in languages beyond English — offers significant potential for applied linguistics and phonetics. Such designs allow researchers to investigate not only whether learners become faster, but how the internal organization of speech evolves over time.

In applied linguistics more broadly, continued engagement with pragmatics, multilingualism, and intercultural communication remains crucial. Additionally, the rapid development of AI-assisted tools invites careful research into how technology can support feedback and practice while preserving the relational dimensions of language education. Language learning is not merely pattern acquisition; it is relational, cultural, and interactional. AI-assisted tools can support language instruction, but they cannot replace the pedagogical, relational, and interpretive role of the instructor. Reducing language education, for instance, to app-based training risks overlooking the interpersonal and pragmatic dimensions that constitute communicative competence. In this context, language departments play a crucial role not only in instruction but in cultivating intercultural awareness and critical linguistic reflection.

What advice would you offer to early-career scholars who aspire to integrate high-level linguistic research with impactful classroom practice?

For early-career scholars who aspire to combine high-level linguistic research with classroom impact, I would offer three reflections. First, read the research carefully and engage deeply with theoretical frameworks; strong pedagogy rests on solid conceptual foundations. Second, critically evaluate whether a given research finding is transferable to the specific sociocultural context in which one teaches. Applicability is never automatic. Third, cultivate curiosity and enjoyment in methodological choices. In my own work, analyzing waveforms and exploring phonetic detail is intellectually rewarding, and that enthusiasm translates into the classroom. When research genuinely interests the scholar, it becomes easier to design meaningful learning experiences.