Rate My Professor Chavalin Svetanant

Chavalin Svetanant is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, a position she has held since 2008. She earned her MA and PhD in Japanese linguistics from Kyoto University. Before joining Macquarie, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Eastern Languages, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and served as a visiting research scholar at the Japanese Research Centre for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. She is also a member of the Lifespan Health and Wellbeing Research Centre at Macquarie University.

Her research specializations include cross-cultural media and communication studies, multimodal discourse analysis, Japanese and Thai linguistics encompassing corpus linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis, and Japanese language education focusing on Japanese as a foreign language, cooperative learning, e-learning, and kanji learning. Svetanant supervises higher degree research students on related topics and has been principal supervisor for PhD theses such as Hideki Sumiyoshi's "The effect of shadowing practice: The case study of Japanese language learners in an Australian university" (awarded 2018), Simon Paxton's "Tackling the kanji hurdle: An investigation of kanji order and its role in facilitating the kanji learning process" (awarded 2016), and Jiayang Hu's ongoing work on semiotic landscapes in Sydney. She has led projects including the Comparative assessment of the pandemic responses in Australia and Thailand (2020-2022, Primary Chief Investigator) and contributions to the Multilingualism Research Centre (2019-2022).

Key publications include "Multimodal engagement strategy focusing on a multi-layered voice concept: theory of persuasion in Japanese insurance TV commercials" with Kaori Okuizumi (Visual Communication, 2026), "Challenging digital authoritarianism: Milk Tea Alliance and transnational solidarity" with Roger Lee Huang (2023), "Mobilizing idol celebrity in queer affective advertising: exploring the impacts of 'Boys Love' media and fandom in Thailand" with Thomas Baudinette (South East Asia Research, 2023), "Emotional engagement in Thai and Japanese insurance advertising: corpus-based keyword analysis" (Corpora, 2022), "What lies underneath a political speech? Critical discourse analysis of Thai PM’s political speeches" (2017, cited 65 times), and "Motivation and attitude towards shadowing: learners perspectives in Japanese as a foreign language" (2017, cited 50 times). She has delivered presentations on multilingual challenges, cross-cultural advertising, and Australia-Thailand COVID-19 responses.