Shelley Staples

Shelley Staples is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona, affiliated with the College of Humanities. She teaches in the undergraduate English program, the MA in TESL, and the PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT). Her office is located in Modern Languages 371, and she can be reached at slstaples@arizona.edu.

Research Interests: Her work centers on corpus linguistics, second language writing, and technology-enhanced language learning. She employs both qualitative and quantitative corpus-based discourse analysis to study language use across spoken and written genres, particularly in academic and professional settings. Her research investigates how linguistic variation relates to register, first language, cultural background, and proficiency levels of second language speakers, with applications to English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) instruction and assessment.

Recent Research Trends: Her recent publications and projects reflect a strong focus on grammatical complexity, academic writing, and healthcare communication. Using corpus methods, she explores functional and register-based approaches to language structure and use, contributing to both theoretical and pedagogical advances in applied linguistics.

Scientific Contributions:

• Author of The Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions (2015, John Benjamins)
• Editor of Talking at Work: Corpus-based Explorations of Workplace Discourse (2016, Palgrave)
• Co-author of The Register-Functional Approach to Grammatical Complexity (2021, Routledge)
• Published in leading journals: Applied Linguistics, TESOL Quarterly, Journal of Second Language Writing, English for Specific Purposes, English for Academic Purposes

Grants and Projects: She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of two significant learner corpus initiatives: the Corpus and Repository of Writing (CROW) and the Multilingual Corpus of Assignments—Writing and Speech (MACAWS). These projects support research on multilingual writing and speech across educational contexts.

Labs and Research Teams: Through CROW and MACAWS, she leads interdisciplinary research teams focused on collecting, annotating, and analyzing learner language data to inform language teaching and assessment practices.