Biography

Anna Filipi is an Associate Professor who teaches in the Master of TESOL program. She is currently the Director of Student Engagement for the Faculty of Education. She has held the administrative positions of Course Leader for the Master of Education (TESOL) and the Master of Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers.

As an Applied Linguist, Anna's research is in Conversation Analysis (CA) and its applications to child social development, including bilingual development and storytelling in family settings, and children's spatial interactions with their peers. She also researches language teaching, language testing, and international students' multilingual practices through the lens of CA. Her research has had a practical impact (on high-stakes language examinations in Victoria) and has added new understandings about the changes in the interactions of very young children (aged 9 to 36 months) as they interact with parents. She has a solid international reputation established over many years in the field and several important publications. These include two monographs (Filipi, 2009; Filipi, Davidson, & Veresov, 2023) and two co-edited volumes (Filipi & Markee, 2018; Filipi, Theobald, & Ta, 2022).

Anna started her career as a language (Italian and French) and ESL teacher in government schools. She then moved into education administration, where she developed extensive state-wide and international experience in teacher professional development and project management. She was a Senior Project Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Education (ACER) where she managed an annual international language testing programme in six languages and in English as a Foreign Language over a seven year period; she was appointed as Panel Chair and Chief Assessor (Italian) and Project Officer at VCAA where she trained assessors and assisted language panels to develop study designs and materials as well as being responsible for developing the Italian Study Design; she worked with the Education Ministry as a Consultant in bilingualism and community languages to support teachers and schools in developing multicultural perspectives, language and bilingual programs. She also lived in Switzerland for two years, continuing to work for ACER as well as teaching EFL, researching multilingualism, and being invited to give papers to the international community of Basel on cross-cultural communication, bilingualism, and the place of English.

While at Monash, Anna has also been involved in consultancy work including developing, coordinating and teaching intensive teacher education courses for English language teachers in China (the inaugural TESOL Professional Learning Program for Zhejiang Provincial Department of Education in 2016) and for Vietnamese secondary teachers across curriculum areas from Hanoi for the Viet Uc Education Company.

Since her time at Monash, Anna has supervised 15 PhD students and one Master's student to successful completion and has a further two who will be submitting by the end of this year.

Research interests

  • Conversation Analysis
  • The interactional properties of First and Second Language teaching and learning
  • Early childhood interaction and storytelling
  • Classroom interaction
  • Bilingualism
  • Language assessment
  • Spatial discourse
  • My own teaching practice

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

Research area keywords

Languages, literatures and literacies Early Childhood Development Bilingualism Language and social interaction Conversation analysis TESOL Language assessment Classroom interaction Spatial discourse Multilingualism