User:Douglas MacKevett

Grüezi!

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I am a US American living in the beautiful Central Swiss city of Lucerne. I am currently employed at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Business, where I teach young and upstart BusAdmin students the complexities of the English language. My wife is Swiss, our daughter a dual national.

My professional interest is directly linked to a personal one, the love of learning languages. My first encounter with learning a foreign language was with Russian, in Siberia, in 1992. I managed fairly well after six months and have since then forgotten almost everything.

My next experience was with Spanish, in Chiapas, Mexico, where my wife ran a hotel and I taught English to sociology students at university. I began studying English more intensely there, while improving my Spanish.

In 1995, we moved to Switzerland, where I have lived since.

CZ Interests

My qualifications and interests lie in applied linguistics with an MA in Education. I have primarily devoted my efforts to language learning and acquisition, discourse analysis and corpus lingusitics. On my to-do list is an article related to the linguistics > grammar entry, where I will attempt an update on "lexis" including the latest research findings from corpora, studies on the genome, and cognitive psychology.

At the moment I am gathering notes and hope to write them up by Christmas 2006. Like all of you, I look forward to participating in the CZ project.