Michael Stevens

Course tutor in English for Academic Purposes

英语语言教学中心

PhD English and Education, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

MA Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

BA Philosophy and Arts & Humanities, Florida Atlantic University

Cambridge CELTA, Bogota, Colombia

I came to UNNC in 2015 as an MA student, and have since continued on a journey taking me through a PhD and into teaching EAP. Prior to this I taught Philosophy, English, and Literature to high school students in Colombia, South America. I also worked briefly as a teaching assistant for children with autism in South Florida, USA. 

As a Graduate Teaching Assistant I have taught modules in various departments at UNNC:

CELE
- Linguistics (year-1)
- Analytical Thought (year-1)

School of English and Education
- Corpus Linguistics (year-4)
- Academic Community (year-2)

My primary area of research is in spoken communication, with focus on hand gestures used for depiction, description, and explanation. So far, I have examined gestures in the context of concept development and learning within EAP settings.

I have also worked extensively on building a multimedia corpus for research into academic spoken English.

Rybarczyk, M., & Stevens Pérez, M.P. (2022). Meaning and Intersubjectivity. In Li, T. (ed.) The Handbook of Cognitive Semantics. Leiden, the Netherlands: E.J. Brill.

Stevens, M. P., Chen, Y., & Harrison, S. (2020). The EMI campus as site and source for a multimodal corpus: Issues and challenges. In Cermakova, A., & Mala, M. (eds.) Variation in Time and Space: Observing the World through Corpora. De Gruyter. 377-401.

Stevens, M. P., & Harrison, S. (2019). Spectrums of thought in gesture: Using gestures to analyze concepts in philosophy. Pragmatics & Cognition, 24(3), 441–473.

June 2021 ‘Practices of embodied formulation in academic group discussions,’ 6th International Conference of Asia-Pacific LSP & Professional Communication Association (Online Conference), City University of Hong Kong

April 2021 ‘Construal in depictive gesturing and practices of sense-making for exposition,’ International Society for Gesture Studies - Hong Kong, Seminar Series

June 2019 ‘From “water face” to “cover”: multimodal translations in the EMI classroom’ (w/ Qianqian Zhou, Simon Harrison, & Yu-Hua Chen), News Discourse and Translation International Conference, UNNC

May 2019 ‘Analysis of gestural depiction sequences in a second language explanation task,’ Conversation Analysis Network-Asia 3rd Annual Symposium on L2 Interaction, Seoul, S. Korea

July 2018 ‘Composites of gesture and speech in concept development by Chinese speakers of English,’ International Society for Gesture Studies 8, Cape Town, South Africa

June 2018 ‘Thinking by Gesture: Exploring gesture in environments of English for Academic Purposes,’ BIB Bringing into Being: Multimodality and cognition in interaction, UNNC

June 2017 ‘Leadership and Power in Student Group Work: A Case Study of Intercultural Communication at a Sino-British University’ (w/ Qianqian Zhou & Yu-Hua Chen), 12th Annual International Conference of the China Association for Intercultural Communication (CAFIC)

October 2016 ‘Metaphoricity, representation, and concept creation in the discourse of philosophical exposition,’ 15th English and Chinese Discourse Analysis Conference: Discourse, Reality and Ways of Thinking, Ningbo University

July 2016 poster: ‘Depiction and Ception in the discourse of philosophical exposition,’ International Society for Gesture Studies 7, Paris, France