Mohammad Reza Montazeri

Current Program: PhD in ALDS

With over a decade of teaching English at various language institutions in Iran, my passion for language and education has deepened even further. Upon completing my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Language Literature and Applied Linguistics in Iran, I became keenly interested in furthering my education in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies. Now, as a full-time PhD student at Carleton University, I am immersed in the fascinating world of research on vocabulary acquisition through the lens of cognitive psychology, focusing on phraseology and formulaic sequences.

Having been inspired by the maxim “You shall know a word by the company it keeps,” by John Rupert Firth (1957), the so-called progenitor of modern collocational studies, I have been researching formulaic configurations (particularly collocations, phrasal verbs, and lexical bundles) over the past few years. I have also published several studies in internationally-recognized journals on the importance of teaching/learning formulaicity in language. I believe that by understanding language learners’ memory practices and strategies for encoding formulaic sequences, we can empower them to communicate with greater complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To this end, I aspire to delve deeper into the research on L2 learners’ acquisition and retention of multi-word expressions in my PhD research, under the supervision of Dr. Brian Strong, utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that merges insights from cognitive psychology and language education.

Area(s) of Interest

• Formulaic Sequences and Phraseology
• Vocabulary Acquisition
• Cognitive Psychology
• Memory Retrieval
• EAP
• Corpus Linguistics
• Authorial Identity