Languages

English mother tongue.
Other languages: Italian (C2), Spanish B2, German (B2)

Qualifications and background

1985 - 88 Bachelor of Commerce (University College Dublin)
1988 - 89 Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing Practice (University College Dublin)
1997 - 98 Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults (University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations)
2001 - 03 Master of Arts in Education (Applied Linguistics) (The Open University, UK)
2008-2013: PhD in Applied Linguistics (University of Limerick). Thesis: "The Rhetorical Functions of Semi-technical Language in Post-graduate Academic Legal Writing"

1990 - 1993 Product manager for Bosch automotive parts, Dublin.
1994 - 2000 English language teacher, Perugia, Italy

Current activities and interests

Since 2004 English tutor at the Sprachenzentrum der Universität und der ETH Zürich.
Language coach for the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Court
Esperto di Lingua at the Scuola Cantonale di Commercio, Bellinzona. 

Special interests:

English for legal academic purposes, corpus linguistics, metadiscourse, genre analysis  and rhetoric.

Presentations and publications

“A literature review of student English academic legal writing in its disciplinary context” European Legal English Teachers’ Association Conference, May 2008.

"The Identification of Semi-Technical Vocabulary in an Academic Legal Written Corpus: A Quantitative-Based Methodology" The Sixth Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies (IVACS) group International Conference on: Corpora across Linguistics, Leeds, June 2012

"The Use of 'or' in Post-graduate Student Academic Legal Writing" International Journal of Legal English, Vol 2 (2), 2014.

"Fitting multiple levels and disciplines into an academic reading programme: challenges and proposed solutions." BALEAP Professional Issues Meeting, Reflections on Reading: Teaching, Learning and Testing. Reading, March 2015

"The role of ‘that’ in managing averrals and attributions in post-graduate academic legal texts", English for Specific Purposes, Vol 40, 2015

"The use of semi-technical vocabulary to understand the epistemology of a disciplinary field." Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Vol 22, 2016 

"The discourse functions of semi-technical vocabulary in student academic legal writing" European Legal English Teachers’ Association Conference, Winterthur, Switzerland, October 2016

Maher, P. & Milligan, S. (2019) "Teaching master thesis writing to engineers: Insights from corpus and genre analysis of introductions." English for Specific Purposes, Vol 55