Faculty of Education and Language Studies
Faculty of Education and Language Studies > People Profiles > Lina Adinolfi
Lina Adinolfi joined the OU as Staff Tutor for Languages in Region 06 in 1997. In 2006 she became a Lecturer on the newly created OpenELT team in the Department of Languages at Walton Hall. These two academic roles – one regional, one central - have provided her with insights in both the production and presentational aspects of supporting language learning and teaching within the OU.
Lina is a member of the INTELLECT research group and is currently studying for a PhD on the role of lexical phrases (prefabricated chunks) in adult second language acquisition. Her professional and research interests also include second language classroom interaction, content and language integrated learning, corpus linguistics, and language teacher development, particularly in a distance learning context.
Lina Adinolfi has nearly twenty five years experience of supporting language learning and teaching, both overseas and in the UK. After graduating in Language and Linguistics, Lina worked as a lettrice at the Universities of Naples and Venice. She then spent six years with the British Council Teaching Centre in Quito, Ecuador, where she participated in a national language teacher re-training project in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and ODA (now DfiD). She then went on to be Deputy Teaching Centre Director at the British Council Thessaloniki, Greece.
Lina joined the OU as Staff Tutor for Languages in R06, where she was responsible for developing a web-based tutorial activity resource bank for ALs, a language student buddy support network and a comprehensive AL peer observation system.
In 2006 she became a member of the new OpenELT team in DoL. She is currently involved in the production of LB160, which aims to develop academic literacy in the field of business studies.
Lina Adinolfi is currently registered as a part-time PhD student under the supervision of Professor Ros Mitchell of the University of Southampton. Her studies are funded by FELS and form part of the Department’s Beginners’ Study, which focuses on aspects of second language learning and teaching at this level.
She is currently analysing the large corpus of spoken classroom interaction that she has created, based on the longitudinal recordings of adult beginner learners of Spanish within the OU. Her particular interest is in the role chunks play in early language acquisition and the correlation between chunk use and success among adult learners.