Hildegunn Dirdal

Hildegunn Dirdal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo. She specializes in English language studies with a focus on second language acquisition, translation studies, and contrastive linguistics. Her work emphasizes corpus linguistics methods applied to learner language analysis. Dirdal leads the TRAWL research group, which maintains a longitudinal corpus of written learner language in multiple languages. She is also Principal Investigator of the MULTIWRITE project examining multilingual writing development in Norwegian secondary schools.

Her teaching responsibilities include courses on English grammar, semantics, second language acquisition, and translation. She has developed and maintains the TRAWL Corpus, a significant resource for studying writing development in English, French, German, and Spanish among Norwegian pupils. This corpus includes student texts, teacher feedback, and detailed metadata about learners and texts.

Research interests center around cross-linguistic influences in language acquisition, clause structure development in L2 writing, and methodological innovations in learner corpus research. Recent work explores vocabulary sophistication in L2 writing and corpus metadata standards. Dirdal collaborates with educators to implement cross-curricular language teaching strategies in schools. She has published extensively on clause usage patterns, translation challenges with complex clauses, and the role of L1 Norwegian in English acquisition.