Role
Laura Manzie is a Senior Lecturer in English as a Foreign Language and a teacher educator. She is also Subject Coordinator for the BA Joint Honours modules in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). As a teacher educator, Laura works on the Cambridge CELTA and as a language teacher she helps students within the School of Arts and Humanities develop discipline-specific academic language and skills. She has also contributed to the management and delivery of the university’s Pre-Sessional English Language Programme, including establishing the programme at Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing.
She has also contributed to NTU’s community outreach agenda through partnership projects connecting teachers/trainee teachers with opportunities to teach refugees and asylum seekers in Nottingham.
Career overview
Laura had a prior career in the civil service which ended accidentally when a three-month sabbatical volunteering in Sri Lanka turned into a longer journey into the world of language teaching that never stopped.
She has had a varied overseas teaching career ranging from teaching five-year olds the alphabet in Sri Lanka to multilingual EFL adult classes in Australia to training English teachers in Vietnam and Turkey. She has taught in universities in Japan, China and the UK and has worked as a trainer and course director delivering Trinity Cert TESOL courses in London.
Research areas
Laura has been conducting various strands of research into academic writing and reading with a focus on how the pervasive but often nebulous academic skill of “criticality” can be developed and realised. She is currently exploring the use of blogging and Academic Reading Circles as loci for fostering criticality.
She also has a research interest in the potential of language teaching classrooms as sites for developing and exploring intercultural competence (ICC).
External activity
Laura occasionally works as a freelance teacher trainer, having undertaken short contracts for private language schools in Nottingham, UK and Izmir, Turkey.
She also is a participant in CARA’s Syrian programme providing English language support to Syrian academics.