Christopher Smith (PhD ALDS/20)

Author, University Professor

• PhD (ALDS)/20

After Renaissance Studies in OCADU’s Florence (Italy) program, followed by 18 years of secondary and university EFL instruction in Korea, I returned to Canada and joined SLaLS in 2015.

I received a Master’s degree from UNE (2014), but wanted to upgrade some courses to prepare for the SLaLS PhD program in 2016. I combined two channels of academic experience in visual communication (OCADU) and decades of English language instruction overseas and focused my research on the multimodal discourses in globally published EFL textbooks.

My dissertation not only focused on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a popular EFL textbook publication, but looked at how the content was negotiated between students and instructors during class and how they valued the lessons in coded interviews. The triangulated approach proved successful and I published a monograph with Bloomsbury Academic, entitled “Understanding Multimodal Discourses in English Language Learning Textbooks: Implications for Students and Practitioners,” in 2022.

In 2023, I signed a contract with Conestoga College, (Kitchener, Ontario, Canada) for a full-time position as professor of communications with The School of Interdisciplinary Studies. I teach intermediate and advanced courses in academic writing and professional communications for several liberal arts departments across the college. My research continues and I have several publications featuring critical studies of ideological undercurrents in language learning textbooks.