Irina Presnyakova, PhD Student
I am a PhD student at the Department of Linguistics. I started my program at SFU in September, 2011, after I completed my MA in English at Marshall University (West Virginia, USA). Before coming to the U.S., I was teaching English for Academic Success for several years in Russia after getting my MA in Linguistics and BA in Education in 2004. While working on my degree in the U.S., I presented at two conferences and wrote a thesis under the supervision of Dr.B.Hong. The topic of my thesis written within the SFL framework was the examination of the changes in the language of instruction of the elementary school textbooks. My areas of interest include Sociolinguistics, Discourse studies, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Genre and Appraisal theory, TESL and TEFL.