Siew Imm Tan

Siew Imm Tan is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra, where she holds the roles of Academic Program Director of the transnational Master of TESOL & FLT (offered in collaboration with Hanoi University, Vietnam) and LANTITE Coordinator. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hong Kong, and has taught in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the PRC in diverse disciplines, including TESOL, linguistics, applied linguistics, and communication and media. She speaks English, Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien and Teochew, a great asset in her research as well as her transnational education portfolio. Siew Imm compiled the first Malaysian English corpus and views the corpus as an essential tool for theorising language. The author of Malaysian English: Language Contact and Change (Peter Lang, 2013), she has also conducted studies on Singaporean English, Philippine English, Hong Kong English, and Australian Aboriginal English. Her research demonstrates the value of corpora and corpus-based approaches in studying lexical, grammatical and conceptual variations across diverse varieties of English worldwide. She is currently engaged in a new research project on Hokkien in the sociocultural context of Singapore. Her disciplinary research contributes to our understanding of the contact and competition between English and other languages in diverse sociolinguistic contexts. Her scholarship is strategic, designed to enhance student experience, to develop their world-readiness and cross-cultural awareness, and to further strengthen the reputation and entrepreneurial potential of the program that she leads.