Christine Johansson

Academic and professional background

1981 B.A. in English and German and M.A. in Languages’ Education within the Teacher Training Programme, Linköping University.
1981-1989 Worked as a high school teacher in German and English.
1995 Ph.D., Uppsala University, doctoral thesis within modern English syntax (The Possessive Relativizers whose and of which in Present-day English. Description and Theory).
1995-1998 Senior Lecturer (English Linguistics) and administrator of courses and teaching in English Linguistics, Department of the Humanities, Örebro University.
1998 - Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics, Uppsala University.
2005 Received one of the Distinguished Teaching Awards (Uppsala University).
2007-2009 Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of English, Uppsala University.

Extract from an interview made with me when I got the Distinguished Teaching Award

(published in a catalogue about studying at Uppsala University and in “Universen”, a paper for employees at Uppsala University)

Christine's methods have attracted much attention and she received one of the Distinguished Teaching Awards of Uppsala University last November. [... ] It's the interest in the subject that is characteristic of a good teacher. Christine is a teacher who is never tired of teaching inflections and morphology and, most importantly, she never bores her students. She points out that it's important to meet every student's need, to give extra teaching or tutorials, if needed, and to be available all the time.

Christine's interest in languages and grammar started quite early. At her parents' home in the small village of Heda, in the county of Östergötland and then later on at the university in Linköping, she laid the foundations for her career as a teacher and later on as a researcher.

To begin with, German was her main subject but she soon discovered that both English literature and grammar were more interesting. Her interest in grammar started during her third semester of her English studies at Linköping University.

As a teacher Christine tries to include her research in the actual teaching by, for example, giving the students at more advanced levels small grammatical topics to study. Is the information in the grammar books correct? It's important, Christine says, that the students are curious about grammar, that they want to find out...

She also stresses that if you continue your studies and finish off with a doctoral degree, you need to be really dedicated and very interested in your subject. You need a great deal of support too, something which Christine has got from her parents. A Senior Lecturer has 20% of research included in the position but the teaching takes up a great deal of time ... It doesn't matter, really, because research or teaching, both are great fun, according to Christine. Teaching and doing research is not only a job -- English grammar is one of the best things in life!

Research

• Relativization strategies in varieties of English (formal spoken British and American English); diachronic syntax, particularly Early and Late Modern English; structural analysis of relative clauses, mainly the development of the placement of preposition and relativizer from Middle to Modern English. Present projects include several studies intended as a detailed description of relativizers diachronically, synchronically and across varieties of English.
• Compilation of a learner English corpus (together with Docent Christer Geisler, Deartment of English, Uppsala University).
• Recent research areas include the 19th century (relativizers and cleft constructions) and language didactics (syntactic aspects of learner English, second language acquisition and gender, syntactic development of Swedish high school students’ writing in English).

Teaching

Teaching is mainly within the teacher training programme including:

• Grammar and Translation
• Linguistics
• Language Structure: Theory and Practice
• School placement (for future high school teachers in Uppsala and in Canterbury, England)
• School visits (future high school teachers)

Teaching on the Master’s level includes

• Early Modern English
• Advanced Linguistic analysis
• Second Language Acquisition
• Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Publications (selected published research and forthcoming)

Modern and historical syntax

1. Johansson, Christine. 1995. The Possessive Relativizers Whose and Of Which in Present-day English. Description and Theory. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.
2. Johansson, Christine. 1997. "The Positional Variation of the Possessive Relativizer Of Which". In Udo Fries, Viviane Müller and Peter Schneider (eds),From Ælfric to the New York Times, 51-64. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
3. Johansson, Christine and Christer Geisler. 1998. "Pied Piping in Spoken English". In Antoinette Renouf (ed.), Explorations in Corpus Linguistics, 82-91. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
4. Johansson, Christine. 2002. "Pied Piping and Stranding from a Diachronic Perspective". In Pam Peters, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (eds), New frontiers in Corpus Linguistics, 147-162. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
5. Geisler, Christer and Johansson, Christine. 2002. "Relativization in Formal Spoken American English". In Marko Modiano (ed), Studies in Mid-Atlantic English, 87-109. Gävle: Gävle University Press.
6. Johansson, Christine. 2002. "The Relativizers Whose and Of Which in Middle English". In Patricia Poussa (ed.), Relativization on the North Sea Litoral, 37-49. München: Lincom Europa. LINCOM Studies in Language Typology 07.
7. Johansson, Christine. 2006. "Relativizers in Nineteenth-century English". In Merja Kytö, Mats Rydén and Erik Smitterberg (eds), Nineteenth-century English: Stability and Change, 136–182. (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8. Johansson, Christine. Forthcoming. "Relativization in Early Modern English: Written versus Speech-Related Genres". To appear in Laurel Brinton and Alexander Bergs (eds), Historical Linguistics of English. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK), Volume II: XV: Early Modern English: 121. Relativization). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Language didactics/learner E nglish

1. Johansson, Christine. 2005. "Supplemental instruction - en pilotstudie inom kursen Engelsk Språkstruktur C". In: Eva Larsson Ringqvist, & Ingela Valfridsson (red). 2005. Forskning om undervisning i främmande språk. Rapport från workshop i Växjö 10-11 juni 2004, 109-118. Växjö: Acta Wexionensia 58.
2. Johansson, Christine. 2006. "Supplemental instruction och lärarstudenters intresse för grammatik i språkundervisningen och i examensarbeten’. In Jan Einarsson, Eva Larsson Ringqvist & Maria Lindgren (eds), Approaches to teaching and learning in linguistic research: Papers from the ASLA symposium in Växjö,10–11 November, 2005, 101–111. Uppsala: Svenska föreningen för tillämpad språkvetenskap.
3. Johansson, Christine. & Christer Geisler. 2009. "The Uppsala Learner English Corpus: A New Corpus of Swedish High School Students’ Writing". In A. Saxena & Å. Viberg (eds), Multilingualism (proceedings of the 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Lingusitics), 181-190.
4. Johansson, Christine. & Christer. Geisler. Forthcoming. "Aspects in the Writing of Swedish L2 Learners of English". To appear in John Newman, Sally Rice, and Harald Baayen (eds), Corpus-Based Studies in Language Documentation, Use, and Learning. Amsterdam: Rodopi.