Svitlana Kurella

Teaching Fellow

Education

2006-present

PhD in Translation Studies Centre­ for Translation Studies, University of Leeds Supervisor - Prof. A. Hartley.

PhD project deals with developing a Computer-Assisted Language Learning environment and methodology of teaching reading skills for students in a new foreign language based on their knowledge of a previously learned cognate foreign language, in particular - teaching students to read in Ukrainian on the basis of their knowledge of Russian. I have implemented some of my theoretical findings in the module "Reading in Ukrainian" (SLAV 3109) http://webprod1.leeds.ac.uk/catalogue/dynmodules.asp?Y=200809&M=SLAV-3109

2004

MA in Slavonic Studies, Computational Linguistics and German as a Foreign Language (Didactics and Methods of Teaching) University of Trier, Germany

­1996­

The equivalent of MA in Primary School Education and Teaching Fine Arts Kirovograd Pedagogical Institute, Ukraine.

Research interests

  • Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), ranging from programming of computer-based exercises to pedagogical implementation of new media
  • Methodology of Foreign Language Acquisition ­
  • Acquiring reading skills, rhetorical text structure, reading strategies, reading assessment
  • Autonomous Learning
  • Corpus Linguistics
  • Systemic Functional Linguistics
  • Contrastive Linguistics of Slavonic Languages

Current research projects

I work on the 'Acquisition of Graded Readers' project which is carried out by the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds. The aim of the project is to develop automated tools for collection and classification of texts from the Web to produce up-to-date reading materials in English, Chinese, German, Russian and Spanish for different target groups of language students in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Language Centre.

Publications in peer-reviewed conference proceedings

Kurella, S., Hartley, A., S. Sharoff. (2008). Rhetorical text structure in acquiring reading skills in L3.
In Proc. of the 8th Teaching and Language Corpora Conference (TaLC 8), pp. 193-197. Lisbon.

Sharoff, S., Kurella, S., Hartley, A. (2008). Seeking needles in the webhaystack: finding texts suitable for language learners.
In Proc. of the 8th Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC 8), pp. 264-268. Lisbon.

Kurella, S., Hartley, A., S. Sharoff. (2008). Corpus-Based Tools for Computer-Assisted Acquisition of Reading Abilities in Cognate Languages.
In Proc. of the the Sixth International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08). Marrakech, Morocco, accessible at http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/.

Kurella, S., Hartley, A., S. Sharoff. (2007). Using cohesive devices for computer-assisted acquisition of reading abilities in L3.
In Proc. of the The 19th ESFLCW 2007, pp. 64-65. Saarbrücken.