OpenLearn Profile

Marina Cantarutti

Marina Cantarutti

Department of Applied Linguistics and English Language

Professional biography

Professional biography

Marina is an Interactional Linguist with an interest in phonetics and gesture in everyday interaction, and have recently joined the OU as a Research Associate at the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics. Marina is co-developing research with the Head of School, Prof. Rosina Márquez Reiter, carrying out interactional socio-pragmatic studies of language use, analysing interactional data in Spanish and English collected in different institutional and everyday settings. She is also currently pursuing my own postdoctoral research involving multimodal studies of everyday interaction, in particular with a focus on collaborative productions.

Marina has recently completed my PhD in Language and Communication at the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, working on the multimodal and sequential design of co-animation (a form of co-production involving joint voicing/enactments) in English interaction. She remains an associate staff member, working closely with the Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication (CASLC).

She started her academic career as an EFL teacher and teacher educator. Before doing my PhD in the UK, she lectured in Practical Phonetics for over a decade and briefly also in Discourse Analysis at different undergraduate and graduate programmes in Buenos Aires, Argentina (ISP Joaquín V González, ENSLV Sofía B de Spangenberg, Profesorado del Consudec, Universidad de Belgrano, and others), training EFL teachers and translators, pre- and in-service, in face-to-face and distance learning programmes. 

Marina holds an MA in English Language with a focus on socio-pragmatic studies (Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires). She has done independent and also team research on prosody-discourse interfaces in English, and on the teaching of prosodic configurations of different speech genres from the perspectives of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Discourse Intonation (Universidad Nacional de La Pampa). 

She also occasionally blogs and curates resources on pronunciation and phonetics teaching and learning, and has made a number of professional development presentations and lead training sessions for in-service English language teachers.

Research interests

She is particularly interested in the study of phonetics and gesture as resources deployed and oriented to by participants in everyday talk-in-interaction, and how these interact with other semiotic systems, such as lexico-grammar. Marina studies different forms of co-production in talk, and explore the ways in which these are used to enact collective identities and multi-person parties in interaction. She is currently exploring the conversational practice of co-animation (i.e. joint reported speech) in English interaction, analysing its sequential, prosodic, and gestural design in different interactional activities. She mainly works with the methodological and theoretical perspectives of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics.

Marina has engaged in the past in the study of discourse-pragmatic approaches to the teaching of pronunciation and intonation of English as a Foreign Language, and the description of different prosodic configurations of speech genres in English from a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective.

Teaching interests

Marina holds over a decade of experience lecturing in Phonetics and Phonology in Higher Education institutions. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, she lectured in Practical Phonetics and Discourse Analysis modules in ELT and Translation programmes. In the UK, she has taught in several modules at the University of York, including introductory Phonetics and PhonologyThe Prosody of English, and Social Interaction and Conversation Analysis, among others. Marina holds a Vice-Chancellor's Teaching Award (UoY, 2019), and Associate Fellowship from the Higher Education Academy (Advanced HE, 2017) in the UK, and a degree in English Language Teaching (ISP Dr Joaquín V González, 2004).

Impact and engagement

Marina has participated widely in public engagement activities, showcasing my research to different audiences. She was a finalist in the Three Minute Thesis competition in York in 2018, and in Falling Walls Lab London in 2019, and got third prize in the UoY 2018 Humanities Research Centre Poster Competition. She took part in several science exhibitions with interactive activities on conversation analytic research for kids and adults such as YorNight, and the Festival of Ideas. Marina is featured in the Linguistic Horizons section of the February 2020 Babel Magazine issue, discussing my work on CA-IL and co-animations.

External collaborations

Marina is currently part of the founding and coordinating committee of the EMCA Remote Data Sessions project (#EMCARemote) with Dr Jack Joyce and Natalie Flint (Ulster University). Since 2017, they have held online data sessions with other postgraduate students and early career researchers from around the world, enabling academics from different points of the globe to exchange knowledge and feedback. The project is now sponsored by the International Society of Conversation Analysis (ISCA).