Emma Riordan

Schuler Assistant Professor in German Applied Linguistics

Research Profile

Dr Emma Riordan is Schuler Assistant Professor in German Applied Linguistics with a research and teaching portfolio that spans language education, multilingual classroom discourse, and teacher language use. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the Centre for Language and Communication Studies at Trinity College Dublin, where her doctoral research focused on the language needs of non-native speaker language teachers. Her monograph Language for Teaching Purposes and a range of peer-reviewed publications reflect a sustained engagement with applied linguistics in educational contexts.

Emma has extensive experience in curriculum development and teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, including modules on Teaching German as a Foreign Language and Applied Linguistics. She has supervised MA theses and contributed to national and international initiatives on digital inclusion, curriculum reform, and teacher education. Her leadership roles include serving as President of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics and founding the interdisciplinary research cluster Language: Cognition, Practice, Policy and Ideology at University College Cork.

In her current role, Emma is particularly interested in supervising postgraduate research in applied linguistics and language teaching and learning. She welcomes proposals that explore teaching German as a foreign language, multilingual education, classroom language use, digital pedagogies, and language policy. Her aim is to support emerging researchers in producing work that is both theoretically robust and practically relevant, contributing to the advancement of language education in higher education and beyond.