Moa Gärdenfors Assistant lecturer

My name is Moa Gärdenfors and I work as a researcher and associate professor in linguistics, focusing on the multilingualism of the deaf and hard of hearing, with a particular emphasis on how knowledge of sign language can be reflected in their writing.

Currently, I lead two research projects. The first examines, from a sociolinguistic and bimodal bilingual perspective, how deaf and hard of hearing signing parents communicate with their hearing children (CODA, Children of Deaf Adults) aged 2–5, whose language skills are not fully developed. The second project is an extension of my doctoral work on the writing of deaf and hard of hearing children. Here, I am collecting written data from deaf and hard of hearing children and teenagers, which includes expanding the project to become a diachronic study, where written data is collected from the same children/teenagers but with approximately 5 years apart. Furthermore, we also aim to make their written texts available in a corpus.

I have gained extensive research experience from my time as a researcher, associate professor, doctoral student, and research assistant, where I have participated in several projects in areas such as bimodal bilingualism, sign language, neuro-/psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics. During these projects, I have, in addition to writing both popular science and peer-reviewed scientific articles, collaborated with other institutions, traveled around Sweden, collected various types of data, assisted in analysis work, and written ethics applications and reports.

My teaching experience spans ten years, where I have taught both at the adult education and university levels, in both practical and theoretical courses. At Stockholm University, I have primarily taught Swedish as a second language for the deaf and in the Bachelor's Programme in Sign Language and Interpreting (KTT).