Anna Kristina Hultgren

Profile

Profile

I started as a Lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at The Open University in January 2013 after a few years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen. Originally trained to teach English and French as a foreign language at secondary level, I began my professional life as a linguist for companies in the speech and language technology industry in Denmark, Belgium and Scotland. After a few years as a linguist in the corporate world, I rediscovered my passion for sociolinguistics by reading Deborah Cameron’s book Good to Talk: Living and Working in a Communication Culture, which critiques the contemporary infatuation with ‘communication’ and ‘communication skills’ and explores its underlying socio-economic reasons. I was very lucky to be able to go on to do a DPhil at Oxford under Deborah Cameron’s supervision. Since my doctoral research, which focused on communicative changes in a type of institution that is iconic of the globalized service economy, call centres, I have moved on to other areas, but I still work within the overall context of how global socio-economic and political restructuring affects and changes the ways in which we use language and the ways we think about it. My more recent research focuses on the causes and consequences of the increasing use of English at Nordic universities and the discourses which surround this phenomenon.

I am a core member of the networks Parallellingual Goals at the Internationalized Universities of the Nordic Countries (funded by the Nordic Council) and English in Europe: Opportunity or Threat? (funded by The Leverhulme Trust). In 2011, I became a member of the Young Academy of Denmark, an interdisciplinary research forum which seeks to build bridges across the sciences and the humanities and across the academy and the wider community.

Teaching Interests

I am part of a team which oversees the module English Grammar in Context (E303) and I also contribute to designing the curriculum and creating the course material for the remake of this module, Exploring English Grammar (E304), to be launched in 2014. I shall also contribute to writing some of the course material for the module Language and Creativity (E302) which is going to replace The Art of English (E301). I have previously taught English language and sociolinguistics at Edge Hill, Oxford and Copenhagen Universities.

Research Interests

My research interests centre on how our ways of communicating change as a result of increased contact - both physical and virtual - between people compared to a few decades ago. My doctoral research focused on the way in which call centre agents in different countries (Denmark, Scotland, Hong Kong and the Philippines) are trained to talk to customers (e.g. by building rapport, expressing empathy and engaging in small talk) and what this tells us about ongoing socio-cultural, economic and political changes which affect the world in general and the globalized service economy in particular. More recently, I have been involved in projects which seek to understand the causes and consequences of the increasing use of English at universities in the Nordic countries and why there seems to be so much anxiety about this phenomenon. I have a long-standing interest in gender and language and in issues relating to epistemology, theory and methodology.

I have undertaken the following research projects:

Linguistic regulation and interactional reality: A sociolinguistic study of call centre service transactions (Funded by the Danish Research Council 2003-2008)

Domain loss in Danish: Rhetoric or reality? (Funded by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation 2010-2012)

Theoretical and practical approaches to teaching English proficiency in the globalized world (Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation 2012-2013)

Publications