GAVIOLI Laura

Laura Gavioli CV
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Laura Gavioli is full professor in English language and translation studies at the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia (Department of Studies on Languages and Culture). She teaches courses in English language and linguistics, dialogue interpreting and translation. Her research work focuses on interaction, both from a cross-linguistic perspective (comparing talk in English and Italian) and as occurring in plurilingual settings, where interlocutors are speakers of English, Italian and other languages. For a number of years, she has analysed dialogue interpreting interactions in public service encounters, mainly in healthcare services and in commercial settings dealing with product sales. Laura Gavioli has carried out work in the area of corpus linguistics, focusing in particular on the use of small, specialised corpora in translation teaching and learning. A further research interest of hers concerns corpora of spoken language. Having been a collaborator in a pioneering experience leading to the construction of the PIXI corpus (which she co-edited, 1990), she has used her experience for coordinating a new collection data: audio-recorded dialogue interpreting interactions in healthcare settings. The collection has been achieved thanks to a long-term collaboration (started in 2004 and still ongoing) with the local healthcare services of the provinces of Modena and Reggio Emilia. This collection is currently one of the largest worldwide of data of this type.


Education and training

Laura Gavioli completed her graduate (cum laude) and postgraduate studies at the University of Bologna, where she held a permanent position as a researcher from 1993 to 1999. In 1999, she was appointed Associate Professor and the following year she moved to the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she became Full Professor in 2006.


Research history

Starting from the late 1980s Laura Gavioli has engaged in research within national and international teams working in the fields of analysis of the spoken language and contrastive analysis of English and Italian, an experience which provided her with the opportunity to participate in the international scientific debate on these topics. Some main long-term research projects she was involved in concern: contrastive pragmatics of English and Italian spoken language; the language of Italian institutional documents; corpus analysis in English language and translation teaching and learning, analysis of interpreter-mediated interaction in healthcare, legal and business settings.
Laura Gavioli’s recent research interests revolve around the study of dialogue interpreting in community settings such as hospitals and courts and in work settings like business exhibitions. This started as part of a very small, locally funded project. Through the years, the project has received increasing interest in the national and international context. Since 2004, it has become a national group project involving colleagues at the University of Bologna, Perugia and Siena (a collection of studies derived from this preliminary project can be found in Gavioli ed. 2009). The group grew larger and has now constituted a national research centre including 10 universities in Italy (The AIM Centre, see below). The corpus of data related to the AIM project consists of over six hundred interactions, mediated by interpreters in the healthcare setting. The work of the AIM group has attracted interest by researchers abroad and has developed into a research network with permanent contacts. An international publication collecting research results from this collaboration was published in 2012 by John Benjamins (Baraldi and Gavioli, eds.). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies edited by Franz Pöchhacker (2015) and The Routledge Handbook of Pubblic Service Interpeting have invited numerous contributions by AIM members.


Academic research activities and service

Laura Gavioli is the Director of the AIM Centre (see above) including 10 universities in Italy. The AIM researchers share interests in studies of interaction from linguistic, psychological and sociological points of view (http://www.aim.unimore.it/site/home.html). The Centre has contacts with the Universities of Heriot-Watt, Lyon2, Mainz, Stockholm, Vienna, Surrey and Northampton.
Following her research experience, Laura Gavioli has trained interpreters and language mediators at undergraduate and postgraduate level and she has been involved in the training of cultural mediators in healthcare institutions. She has served as an external examiner of PhD theses dealing with interpreter-mediated interaction, for several Universities (Bologna, Warwick, Ghent, Trieste, Turin, Heriot-Watt and Stellenbosch). She has been the supervisor of several PhD students, one of which, run in collaboration with an international company, was one of the first projects in Italy applying research in human sciences to industrial activity. She has organized a number of seminars and workshops for PhD students and junior researchers in interpreter-mediated interaction and in institutional interaction. Together with Cecilia Wadensjö (Stockholm University), she had edited The Routledge Handbook of Public Service Interpreting (Routledge 2023).
Laura Gavioli has been active in research networking. She was a member of a Research Network (ReN) of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA), which worked on the analysis of spoken language at the workplace. She was invited as an expert to join a European “COST” program (Cooperation in Science and Technology: Action number: IS0603 Health and Social Care for Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Europe), involving 23 countries.
She is a member of associations of linguistics, pragmatics and conversation analysis (AIA, AILA, AItLA, ICCA, IPrA), has been a member of the Directing Board of the Italian Association of Applied Linguistics (AItLA) for nine years and the vice-president of the Association for six years. She is a member of the advisory board of the European Journal of Applied Lingusitics and of the scientific board of the journal ESP across cultures and of AION-Linguistica. She has acted as a referee for international publishers (Benjamins, Palgrave) and journals (e.g. Research on Language and Social Interaction- RoLSI, European Journal of Applied Linguistic – EuJAL, Interpreting, Journal of Pragmatics). She has been in the scientific committee of several national and international congresses and initiatives and was invited as a keynote speaker at several international events.

Academic Teaching and coordinating activities

Laura Gavioli holds courses about dialogue interpreting and corpus-based methods as translation and language learning aids in undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia; she directed an undergraduate programme in European Languages and Cultures for two mandates and a programme in teachers’ training for the national qualification in foreign language teaching (middle school and high school). She has been part of the directing board of her faculty and her department for many years and she is currently representing her areas of study in the team constituting the Observatory of Research development in her University.


Public engagement and extra details

Laura Gavioli has coordinated programmes for language teachers’ training at the Pädagogisches Institut in Bozen and has collaborated with teachers’ training institutions, like LEND.
She has collaborated to training programmes for public service interpreters and intercultural mediators, organized by local healthcare services, in particular the Reggio Emilia services.
Her authored book Exploring corpora for ESP learning, published by John Benjamins in 2005 has been re-published for the Chinese market, with a long introduction in Chinese language, in 2016.