Sanna
Olkkonen
English, Classics and Multilingual Translation Studies
PhD

Areas of expertise

Second language learning
fluency
second language reading and writing
cognitive processes in language learning

Biography

I am working in the Department of English as a postdoctoral researcher. My current project concentrates on cognitive fluency of English-speaking learners of Finnish, funded by the Turku University Foundation (2023–2024).

I defended my doctoral thesis in 2017 at the University of Jyväskylä, in applied linguistics. In 2021–2022, I worked as a postdoc at the University of Turku, in Fluency and Disfluency Features in L2 Speech (FDF2) project. The project was funded by the Academy of Finland and led by professor Pekka Lintunen. My doctoral thesis and postdoc projects have both dealt with foreign language learning, covering reading, writing, and speaking. I am also a member of the Turku university research group FlowLang. During the spring 2022, I was a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Alongside research, I work as a teacher of Finnish as a second language.

I am especially interested in how cognitive processing affects learning a second or foreign language, and how understanding the background processes of language use can help in explaining different features of, for example, fluent or disfluent speaking or efficient reading.

Publications

Sort by: