Jeannette Littlemore facts for kids
Jeannette Littlemore is a British expert in applied linguistics, which is the study of how language is used in real life. She focuses on how people understand and use special language like metaphor and metonymy. These are ways we use words to mean something different from their usual meaning.
Her research often looks at how people learning English as a second language sometimes misunderstand these figures of speech. She helps us understand why this happens and how to make learning easier.
Her Education
Jeannette Littlemore earned her PhD degree in English Language Teaching in 1998. She studied at Thames Valley University, which is now known as the University of West London.
Her Career in Academia
Professor Littlemore has worked at the University of Birmingham in the UK since 1999. Before that, she taught and gave lectures in different countries, including Belgium, Japan, and Spain.
At the University of Birmingham, she was once the head of the English Language and Applied Linguistics department. Today, she is a full Professor there.
In 2016, she also became a special "Distinguished Professor" at the Research Institute for Bilingual Learning and Teaching (RIBiLT). This institute is part of the Open University of Hong Kong. In this role, she helps other teachers and researchers with their studies and publications.
She is also part of an international group called the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam. They give advice on studies about metaphors.
In 2014, Professor Littlemore and two colleagues, Dr. Paula Perez-Sobrino and Dr. David Houghton, received an important research grant. It was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship worth about £138,981. This money helped them work on a project called 'Exploring Multimodal Metaphor and Metonymy in Advertising' (EMMA).
The EMMA project studied how people react to video advertisements. They looked at how speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese understood the metaphors and metonymies used in these ads.
Her Books and Articles
Professor Littlemore has written many books and articles about language. Her work helps us understand how people think about and learn new languages. She often writes about how metaphors and other figures of speech are used in communication.
