OUMOUNA, AMIRA

Amira Oumouna holds a BA in Common Core English (2018, Yahia Fares University, Algeria) and an MA in English Linguistics (2020, Yahia Fares University, Algeria). She also completed an MA in Linguistics and its Application for a Multilingual Society from the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve (2022, Belgium). She currently holds a position as FPI researcher at the Department of English and German at the University of Santiago de Compostela, funded by a four-year grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (PREP2023-001326; 01/10/2025–30/09/2029).

As a Master’s student (2021–2022), Amira completed a five-month internship at the Valibel – Discourse and Variation Center at Louvain-la-Neuve. During this internship, she contributed to the English Press Project, where she analysed the parenthetical think in the EUROPARL7 English corpus.

She also served as a coordinator at the American Summer University in Algeria (2023) and participated in a national conference on English for Specific Purposes that same year. During the 2022–2023 academic year, she taught Introduction to Applied Linguistics to first-year students at Yahia Fares University. In 2024 she taught Study Skills to second-year students. In the same year, she assessed and organized English workshops for first-year PhD students at the same university. In 2025, she taught Reading and Text Analysis to first-year students, again at Yahia Fares University.

Amira is currently preparing her PhD dissertation on the evolution of discourse-structuring markers in World Englishes under the supervision of María José López-Couso and Belén Méndez-Naya.

Contact information:

Department of English and German
Facultad de Filología
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
E-15782 Santiago de Compostela, SPAIN
Sala de Investigación, first floor
E-mail: amira.oumouna@rai.usc.gal

MA dissertations

(2020, Yahia Fares University, Algeria): A discursive psychology-based approach to exploring the psychological dispositions lying behind females’ higher speech intelligibility: A case study of 1st, 2nd and 3rd year EFL students of the English Department at Yahia Fares University-Medea. Supervisor: Hiba Zaidi.

(2022, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium): Exploring the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors behind code-switching in Algeria: A combined corpus analysis, elicitation study and sociolinguistic questionnaire. Supervisor: Liesbeth Degand.

Conference presentations

1-3 July 2026: VII AEDEAN Doctoral Seminar, University of Cantabria: "Grammaticalization of discourse structuring markers in Singapore English and Indian English: A comparative corpus-based study".

29 May 2026: III Xeira CLARIAH-GAL, University of Santiago de Compostela: "Humanidades Dixitais aplicadas ao estudo da variación e o cambio lingüístico: O proxecto Construcións e construcionalización en inglés histórico e contemporáneo" [poster]. [Eighth author, with María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Zeltia Blanco-Suárez, Tamara Bouso, Teresa Fanego, Jorge Fernández-Avilés & Paloma Núñez-Pertejo].

8 May 2026: IDAES Graduate Day 2026, University of A Coruña: "Discourse structuring markers in World Englishes: A cross-varietal comparison".