Philip Shaw Professor Emeritus

Philip retired in 2015 but is still active in a desultory way, reviewing things, updating publications, etc. 

He was educated at Oxford, Reading and Newcastle Universities. He received a Ph.D. from Newcastle in 1983. The title of his dissertation was The major derivatives from place-names in English and German. Before doing his MA in Linguistics at Reading he worked in Thailand (Chiang Mai and Nakhon Pathom) for four years. Between the MA and the PhD he worked in Germany, mainly at the University of Bonn. From 1978 to 1996 he was a Lecturer, latterly Senior Lecturer, in the Language Centre of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1996 he was attacked by itchy feet again: he worked as a Senior Lecturer at the Århus School of Business for four years, and has been at Stockholm University, as a Senior Lecturer and/or Docent since 2000, and as a Professor from 2005 to his retirement in 2015. From 2006-2008 he worked part-time as a guest professor at the Unit for Languages and Communication at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology. In the summer he is interested in birds, botany and butterflies, and now he has retired he spends a lot of time on Naturskyddsföreningen, the Swedish organisation for nature conservation. 

He used to teach courses on World Englishes, second language acquisition, and languages for specific purposes.

His publications include many articles on applied aspects of academic and business English (and some on word-formation) and the textbook World Englishes: an Introduction (with Gunnel Melchers; 2003, second edition 2011, third edition, with Peter Sundkvist, 2019).  He was co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes (2016) and 

Student Plagiarism in Higher Education 

(2018). Four ex-funded projects are still somewhat active:

• PROFILE (led by Diane Pecorari, Linné with colleagues from Linné and Chalmers) which examines the quality and quantity of English acquired by doing an MA in another subject through the medium of English.
• EVA (with Hans Malmström, Diane Pecorari, Aileen Irvine, and Spela Mezek) which looks at students’ acquisition of vocabulary from reading in English while taking courses in Swedish (funded by Vetenskapsrådet 2009-11).
• AAA project 4, (with Alan McMillion and Spela Mezek) which compares Swedish students’ reading comprehension and processes with those of British equivalents required to read the same textbook and has tried to do the same with listening comprehension. (The AAA project, involving many members of the SU Faculty of Humanities, is funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund 2006-12)
• and a nameless project (with Tim Caudery and Margrethe Petersen) on accent, motivation, and language learning among exchange students at universities in Denmark and Sweden (funded by Nordplus Språk 2004-2006).