Milene Mendes de Oliveira
Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics & Intercultural Communication
Welcome to my website! Here you’ll find information about my past and current research activities, publications, some media content, and future conferences.
If you would like to contact me directly, please use the contact form on this website. You are also welcome to connect via ResearchGate or LinkedIn.
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About Me
Lecturer and Researcher in Applied and Sociolinguistics & Intercultural Communication
Currently, I am a Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Prior to this position, I acted as a Guest Professor of Media, Communication, and Culture at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt Oder in Germany. From 2020 until 2024, I headed the sub-project ‘Digital Communities and Online Intercultural Competence’ under the consortium "ReDICo: Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively", funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
My ReDICo study revolved around digital interculturality in intercultural online games. For that study, I invited students from different institutions and nationalities to play the intercultural game Megacities (created by Jürgen Bolten), recorded the online game rounds, and analyzed communicative practices (in English as a lingua franca) in the game (played via Zoom) and their connection to the concept of ‘intercultural competence’. Interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis provided me with useful conceptual and analytical frameworks.
My main research interests are:
Digital and intercultural practices,
English as a lingua franca,
Foreign language teaching and learning,
Business communication.
My Research Projects
ReDICo: Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively
2020-2024
The group’s work centers upon the research and analysis of intercultural practices and discourses within digital spaces and investigates diverse topics such as intercultural competence in internet settings, digital Europeanism, and online neo-nationalisms.
My ReDICo sub-project focuses on intercultural games. I am interested in the interplay of practices and ideologies in this kind of intercultural intervention. Check out my latest publications on this website.
Multilingualism and multimodality
2019-2020
In connection to the project “Intercultural Communication in Interaction: multimodal approaches” (headed by Ulrike Schröder and funded by the WUN foundation), my colleague Adriana Barbosa Fernandes and I conducted a study on how in-service and pre-service teachers position themselves in relation to their foreign-language teaching and learning experiences and how they negotiate their identities as (future) teachers in a focus-group discussion. Our analysis, based on positioning theory and gesture studies, revealed a certain tension between current trends and more traditional discourses in the field of English teaching. The link to the pre-print can be found on this website.
Babbel study: Learners’ perceptions of a virtual-classroom system
2019-2020
In 2019 I engaged in a collaboration with the language learning company Babbel. After months of conversation aiming at getting a deep understanding of their products and didactic strategies, I proposed a study on their virtual-classroom solution to business professionals "Babbel Intensive." The project was very fulfilling in a number of ways. For example, I was able to involve students from the University of Potsdam in the project who participated in data collection and analysis. Moreover, these students and I profited from close interaction with Babbel which taught us the benefits of combining the theoretical knowledge acquired at the university with the development of user-centered language-learning solutions. The results of this project were published in the Computer Assisted Language Learning journal.
