Dr. Maria Melissourgou is a tenured academic staff member at the Department of Mediterranean Studies of the University of the Aegean, specializing in the area of Applied Linguistics. She teaches Text Linguistics, Research Methodology in Linguistics, Terminology issues in Linguistics and Digital Technologies in Education. She also participates in the teaching of the courses Corpus Processing and Computational Linguistics. She has extensive working experience in teaching English as a Foreign Language in all levels of Education. She has also worked as the Director of Studies in a Foreign Language Centre.
She is a graduate of the Department of English Studies in the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens, (B.A.) and of the Open University, U.K. (M.Ed). In 2016 she earned her Ph.D (grade: Excellent) for her thesis: Genre awareness in writing for testing purposes from the Department of Mediterranean Studies, the University of the Aegean. Her postdoctoral research work in the Laboratory of Informatics in the same department, examines texts promoting Greek agro-food products in international markets intended to raise exports. She presents papers in international scientific conferences and publishes articles in journals, edited books and conference proceedings.
The focus of her research activity is on the construction of specialised Corpora and their analysis, aiming to identify the most prevalent genres in specific contexts (e.g. academic, professional). Working with specialized software and statistical tools she highlights typical linguistic and stylistic characteristics in specific genres. This type of work adds insight into the teaching of writing, the writing of specialized texts by professionals as well as to the field of Automatic Genre Identification (AGI).
Selected Publications
Melissourgou, M.N., Maruster, L. & Frantzi, K.T. (2020). The research article: Stylistic variation across disciplines and change over time. In the proceedings of the 2nd International EAP and ESP Conference Options, Practices and Possibilities of EAP and ESP Practitioners, 20-23 September, 2019 (p. 40-52). Heraklion: University of Crete.
Melissourgou, M. N. & Frantzi, K. T. (2019). Stories, second language writers, and genre awareness. In V. Kourtis-Kazoulis, T. Aravossitas, E. Skourtou and P.P. Trifonas (Eds.) Interdisciplinary Research Approaches to Multilingual Education pp. 117-129. Abingdon/NY: Routledge.
Melissourgou, M. N. & Frantzi, K. T. (2018). Moving Away from the Implicit Teaching of Genres in the L2 Classroom. Corpus Pragmatics, 2(4), 351-373.
Melissourgou, M. N. & Frantzi, K. T. (2017). Genre Identification Based on SFL Principles: The Representation of Text Types and Genres in English Language Teaching Material. Corpus Pragmatics, 1(4), 373-392.
Melissourgou, M. N. (2015). The language of reports in general English language testing: A corpus-based analysis. In E. Nichele, D. Pili-Moss & C. Sitthirak (Eds.), Papers from the 10th Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics & Language Teaching 2015, vol. 10 (pp. 33-52). Lancaster, UK: Lancaster University.
