Emma is Professor of Language Education at the University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of St. Anne’s College and is a member of Oxford’s Applied Linguistics Research Group and the Subject Pedagogy Research Group. After her first degree in French and Spanish (at the University of Nottingham), she trained as a secondary school teacher (at the University of Manchester) and has taught languages in England, France, Spain, and Chile. After teaching languages, she then undertook an MA, PhD, and Post-Doctoral Fellowship, all funded by the ESRC at the University of Southampton. She worked in the Department of Education at the University of York from 2004 to 2026 with various citizenship roles including Director of Research and Chair of the Ethics Committee.
Her research and engagement work focuses on the learning and teaching of languages in instructed settings, and particularly on modern language education in secondary schools. She has conducted lab- and classroom-based research to help us better understand how second languages are learned, how—and how much—instruction can influence learning, and the nature of language knowledge and proficiency particularly in low-exposure settings. She is particularly interested in the development of vocabulary and grammar. Her work with colleagues has been funded by the British Academy, ESRC, EPSRC, DfE, Erasmus, Higher Education Innovation Funding, and the Dutch and Canadian research funding councils.
Emma has initiated and (co-)led several large international open scholarship initiatives to help improve access to research in the language sciences with a view to enhancing both its reach and quality. These include OASIS (https://www.oasis-database.org/) to facilitate engagement with research within communities beyond academia; IRIS (https://www.iris-database.org/) to enhance the availability of research materials and data; and the MultilingProfiler (https://www.multilingprofiler.net/), to allow language educators and materials and test developers to analyse the lexical content of texts in different languages.
She was editor of Language Learning (Wiley) from 2015 – 2022 (as Associate then Journal Editor), and has delivered a number of plenary talks at national and international conferences for researchers and teachers. Emma has several awards for her work with colleagues, including the ACTFL-NFMLTA/MLJ Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in Foreign Language Education.
Emma often works at interfaces between research, practice, and policy. She directed, with Dr Rachel Hawkes, the DfE funded National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy (NCELP; 2018-2023) and she has worked on changes to assessment and curriculum, including the General Certificate of Secondary Education in French, German, and Spanish in England and the Key Stages 2 and 3 curricula in Northern Ireland.
External PhD student
Emily Robinson (Comparing language-driven and topic-driven approaches to teaching Spanish in schools).