Belinda Crawford (Camiciottoli) is an Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica (Università di Pisa). She holds a PhD (cum laude) in Applied Linguistics from Universitat Jaume I, Castellón de la Plana, Spagna, an M.Ed from Framingham State University (Framingham, Massachusetts) and a B.Ed. from Florida State University (Tallahassee, Florida).
Her research focuses primarily on the analysis of the English language in professional, academic, intercultural, and digital communicative contexts. Her work has been largely motivated by the learning environments where she has taught speakers of languages other than English, often motivated by the perception of a particular difficulty or need among her students who, like their counterparts all over the world, are challenged to communicate in English in a growing variety of settings. In response, she has collected and analyzed various types of discourse across a range of research domains, including business/corporate communication, the language of fashion, new media discourse, and academic discourse. The theoretical framework of her research draws on pragmalinguistics, social constructivism, and multimodality, while the methodology reflects an integration of quantitative corpus-based techniques and follow-up qualitative discourse analysis in the context of usage to interpret empirical results (i.e., corpus-assisted discourse analysis). She has applied her findings to the development of teaching methods and materials that help learners to acquire the multi-faceted competence needed to successfully engage in increasingly sophisticated communicative situations.
She has over 100 publications and has published extensively in leading international journals. She was invited to contribute to the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, the Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes, and the Routledge Handbook of Corpora in English Language Teaching and Learning. She serves as reviewer for numerous international journals and am a member of the Editorial Board of English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) and the Advisory Board of Language Value. She has served on PhD defense committees in Italy, Spain and Singapore.
Her international teaching experiences include Assistant Professor of Business Communication (Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE), adjunct professor for the course ““Organizational Communication and its Social Context” for students of the Leonard N. Stern School of Business attending the New York University in Florence semester abroad program, guest lecturer at Universitat Jaume I (Castellon de la Plana, Spain) and at Aalto University School of Business (Helsinki, Finland), and online business writing tutor for Columbia University (USA).
She is currently the Director of the interuniversity research center CLAVIER (Corpus and LAnguage Variation In English Research) that comprises research units at the Universities of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Bergamo, Firenze, Milano, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Roma “La Sapienza”, Siena, Trieste, Bari, Calabria, and Pisa. https://clavier.fileli.unipi.it/