I am Pauliina Peltonen, a researcher in applied linguistics. I work as a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Turku. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher in the project Fluency and Disfluency Features in L2 Speech. The project is funded by the Research Council of Finland. During spring 2023, I was a visiting researcher at Philipps-University Marburg.

My research interests include second language (L2) learning, fluency in L2 speech, L2 oral proficiency, L2 interaction, communication strategies, and multimodality.

I defended my doctoral dissertation entitled “Individual and Interactional Speech Fluency in L2 English from a Problem-solving Perspective: A Mixed-methods Approach” on September 11th, 2020 at the University of Turku and received my PhD degree on September 16th, 2020. In the article-based dissertation, I examined the interplay between second language fluency and problem-solving mechanisms, such as communication strategies. The work was funded by the Utuling doctoral programme in 2014–2017 and by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation in 2019–2020 (6-month finalization grant).

I have also collaborated on papers focusing on intonation and fluency (with Lintunen and Webb) and pronunciation feedback (with Lintunen and Mäkilähde) (for details, see Publications).

I am a member of the research group FlowLang and a member of the executive team for Leala, The Centre for Language Learning Research at the University of Turku. During 2017–2020, I was a member of the executive board for the Finnish Association for Applied Linguistics (AFinLA; vice-chair during 2019–2020). Since 2014, I have been a member of the AFinLA research network Speech and Spoken Language Research.

During the academic year 2021–2022, I worked as a substitute university lecturer in the English Department, University of Turku. Before that (2020–2021), I worked as a project researcher in the project Fluency across Multilingual Speakers (MultiFluency) at the University of Turku. The project is funded by The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.

Previously, I worked as a part-time project researcher in the Erasmus+ funded project Language and literacy learning through art (LALI) at the University of Turku (2018–2019). Additionally, I have worked as a university teacher in the English Department at the University of Turku (2019), as a part-time teacher in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki (2018, 2019, 2021), and as a part-time teacher at the Helsinki Summer University (2021).