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I am a professor of English as a second/foreign language (an American ex-pat), and currently work as the Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Education in Hamar/Lillehammer. This is part of Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences (formerly Hedmark University of Applied Sciences). I have worked in teacher education since 2001.
You can meet me on Twitter @NaceySusan.
My main research interests are metaphor and learner language, with a focus on Norwegian L2 English, as well as L2 Norwegian. I published a monograph entitled Metaphors in Learner English in 2013, dealing with metaphors produced in the written English of Norwegian students, as well as methodological issues concerning the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIPVU). I was also responsible for collecting the Norwegian version of the LINDSEI corpus of spoken learner English. The interviews and transcriptions are now completed and have been sent to Louvain to be included in the second edition of LINDSEI. I have also been involved in compiling the TraWL corpus (Tracking Written Learner Language), a longitudinal corpus of English texts written by Norwegian pupils aged 10 – 19, and have conducted research based on the primary data here. I have also conducted research on the metaphors written by L2 learners of Norwegian, from texts collected in the Norwegian Second Language Corpus. In addition, I have conducted research in areas such as communication strategies, prepositions, and phrasal verbs in learner language.
I also research metaphors in discourses beyond the second language context. I am also interested in the ‘language of betrayal’, metaphors produced by survivors of relationship abuse when they discuss their experiences in an online discussion forum. I have also investigated metaphor production in career guidance videos, American church marquees, the New Year’s Eve speeches of the Norwegian king and Danish queen, doctoral dissertation acknowledgements, etc. Metaphor is all around us!
Further, methodological issues connected to metaphor research are a concern of mine, especially (linguistic) metaphor identification and valid statistical analysis. Together with A.G. Dorst, T. Krennmayr, and W.G. Reijnierse, I edited a 2019 volume entitled Metaphor identification in multiple languages: MIPVU around the world.
I am an editor the scientific journal Metaphor and the Social World, along with A.G. Dorst (Leiden University) and D. Tay (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University). I am also an associate editor of Metaphor and Symbol, where H.L. Colston (University of Alberta) is the editor-in-chief. I am also a member of the editorial board of the Nordic Journal of English Studies. I am also on the conference secretary on the board of the Learner Corpus Association.
A further interest of mine is sustainability in academia. I am especially interested in how we can benefit from our experiences with the pandemic. I was the chair of the local organizing committee (LOC) for RaAM2020, the 13th biannual conference for the Association of Researching and Applying Metaphor, an international research conference that was converted from a physical to a digital format in 2020. In 2021, I was the co-chair (along with Siri Fürst Skogmo) of the LOC for the Graduate Student Conference in Learner Corpus Research, a virtual conference under the aegis of the Learner Corpus Association.
My work is registered in the Current Research Information System in Norway (Cristin): here.
I am a member of INN University’s research group ‘English Language in Use’ (ELiU). Read here to find out what EliU does (or here if you understand Norwegian).
You can reach me via email at susan.nacey@inn.no.