Staff profile

Dr Nuria Polo-Pérez is an Assistant Professor (Education) in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. A Fellow of the HEA, she teaches and convenes Spanish language modules within the Centre for Foreign Language Study, where she also serves as Spanish Coordinator. In addition, she contributes to the MA in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, teaching and convening two modules: Intercultural Communication and Education and Language for Teaching. She has also taught on postgraduate modules in the School of Education, including Intercultural Communication and Language, Education and Power.

She supervises MA dissertations on diverse topics within the field of TESOL and Applied Linguistics. She has also been an External Examiner for a doctoral thesis in interculturality in foreign language learning.

Dr Polo-Pérez holds a degree in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid, an MA in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language from the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, and a PhD in language education from Durham University.

Her research interests lie primarily in the field of language and intercultural education. Through her ethnographic work on “language cafés”—public events which provide an informal learning space for (foreign) language socialisation—she has developed the concept of the multilingual social self. It refers to a self-concept that is co-constructed through multilingual social interaction and involves an image of self as able to socialise and flow in multilingual environments through the mobilisation of complex repertoires and multilingual subjectivities (e.g., the memories, emotions, and personal attachments linked to different languages). It is a multilingual self that disentangles itself from the institutional roles that teachers and students often have to play in the classroom setting.

Underpinning her research is a commitment to representing the complexities of language and intercultural learning as an empowering and intersubjective endeavour involving the (re)construction of self and the potential to effect social change—i.e., challenging monolingual ideologies and essentialist views of culture, thus informing new, encompassing ways of understanding multilingualism and interculturality in society.

She is currently preparing a monograph, Collaborative Language Learning, Multilingual Identities and Interculturality: Experiencing otro mundo in “Language Cafés”, to be published in 2027 by Multilingual Matters.

 

Chapter in book

• Languaging In Language Cafés: Emotion Work, Creating Alternative Worlds and Metalanguaging
  
  Polo Perez, N., & Holmes, P. (2022). Languaging In Language Cafés: Emotion Work, Creating Alternative Worlds and Metalanguaging. In V. Lytra, C. Ros i Sole, & J. Anderson (Eds.), Liberating Language Education (pp. 99-117). Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781788927956-008
• Researching language cafés: Engaging the researcher’s authentic multilingual self
  
  Polo-Pérez, N. (n.d.). Researching language cafés: Engaging the researcher’s authentic multilingual self. In S. Consoli & S. Ganassin (Eds.), Reflexivity in applied linguistics research: Opportunities, challenges and suggestions [Contracted by publisher]. Routledge.

Conference Paper

• (Re)constructing imagined identities in language cafés: an ethnographic inquiry
  
  Polo-Pérez, N. (2020). (Re)constructing imagined identities in language cafés: an ethnographic inquiry. In H. Axbey & S. Riddle (Eds.), Imagining Better Education: Conference Proceedings 2019.

Journal Article

• Translanguaging as methodology to study language cafés: implications for managing multilingual data
  
  Polo-Pérez, N., & Holmes, P. (2023). Translanguaging as methodology to study language cafés: implications for managing multilingual data. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 44(8), 737-750. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2023.2197882