Kristin Killie
Job description
My areas of responsibility are teaching, supervision and research within English language, language acquisition, and language didactics.
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Research interests
Historical linguistics
I have for many years been carrying out research within historical linguistics. My studies focus on the development of three different constructions: the ‑ly suffix, the progressive, and adverbial –ing clauses. I have studied these constructions from various perspectives, such as grammaticalization, subjectification, language contact, and sociolinguistics. Some of the studies are contrastive. I am currently involved in a project about the development of sentence adverbs in English. This is joint work with Prof. Dagmar Haumann at the University of Bergen.
I am a member of the research group Language Data and Language Change (LDLC) at the University of Bergen.
Language acquisition and didactics
In addition to my research on language change, I have in recent years carried out research on second language acquisition and language didactics in the project TALE (Teaching and Learning English), which is a joint project with colleagues at the Department of Education at UiT. In TALE, we aim to throw light on the following research questions:
- Which points of English grammar, phonetics etc. are relatively easy to learn and consequently fall into place by themselves, and which points require focus in language teaching because they are difficult to learn on one’s own?
- How can we work with the difficult points in a way which is both motivating and goal-oriented/effective?
Teaching
I teach English language (grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, variation etc), language didactics, language acquisition, multilingualism, and academic writing and supervise students on their master's theses.
