Dr Marion Nao

Marion’s work focuses on discourse and interactional analysis in applied and theoretical contexts, particularly healthcare and education. She combines close qualitative examination of language-in-use with the systematic analysis of larger datasets, drawing on approaches from sociolinguistics, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and discourse studies. She is currently developing work in metaphor analysis and systemic functional linguistics (SFL).

She was awarded her PhD in Language and Communication Research from Cardiff University and has held research posts at King’s College London, The Open University, and The University of Edinburgh. She has taught on a range of higher education programmes at Cardiff University, University of Leicester, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain, and Kanda University of International Studies in Japan. Additionally, she has lived and worked in Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic.

She has published in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and Higher Education. For a list of publications, see: https://publicationslist.org/marionnao

She is a member of the ESRC Peer Review College and has previously secured ESRC funding for her postdoctoral project: The institutionalisation of conversation practice between teacher and student in foreign language pedagogy

At the Open University, she worked on the UKRI-funded ELEMENTAL project, exploring Englishization in European higher education in the context of its governance, and continues to engage in its research dissemination.  

Marion is currently an Honorary Associate, developing an Open Societal Challenge project, together with Korina Giaxoglou, which explores the impact of personal stories of cancer shared on social media on those with lived experience: Public cancer stories for wellbeing: Keeping it real in an age of influencer culture

She is also collaborating with Chris Tang from King’s College London on outputs from a project examining the experience of stigma in gestational diabetes (GDM). With an interest in health and wellbeing in pregnancy, she is a member of the Reproduction, Sexualities and Sexual Health Research Group (RSSH) at the Open University.