Dr Pauline Madella

• I specialise in Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis and Forensic Linguistics. 

My primary domain of expertise as a cognitive linguist includes the realm of pragmatics, the use of prosody and nonverbal communication in utterance interpretation, and the role of multimodality in interlanguage and instructional pragmatics.

My second research strand focuses on analysing the pragmatics of discursive manipulation and deception in the context of online child sexual grooming, with a view to detecting and preventing OCSEA. 

I am an Associate member of Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment (CRELLA) and the Safer Young Lives Research Centre (SYLRC). 

I am also a member of 

ENACSA - the Expert Network Addressing Child Sexual Abuse

IAFLL - the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics 

IPrA - the International Pragmatics Association 

& UKALTA - the UK Association for Language Testing and Assessment 

Current Research England funded project: Co-Creating Youth-Informed Policy Responses to Online Grooming: Bridging Research and Participation; for details of the project, see Pauline Madella's lab | University of Bedfordshire based on collaboration between CRELLA and SYLRC within Institute of Applied Social Research 

Current Pearson project: Is PTE Core fit-for-specific purpose? Analysing the suitability of PTE Core for testing healthcare professionals' English oral proficiency, with my colleagues N. Latimer and F. Nakatsuhara. 

Areas of enquiry for PhD supervision include, but are not limited to:

• Pragmatics and Applied Pragmatics 
• Assessing L2 pragmatic competence 
• Pragmatics & prosody 
• Pragmatics & prosody in L2 learning/teaching/testing 
• Multimodality (prosody and gesture in interaction) 
• First and second language development, (social) cognition, pointing, salience and psychology (Psycholinguistics) 
• Pragmatics of manipulative and deceptive discourse in forensic contexts 
• Discourse and social justice 
• Pragmatics of (social) media discourse 
• Corpus-assisted approaches to pragmatics and discourse analysis 

PhD supervision:  

(2026-present) Investigating the role of body movement in developing L2 English intonation