Rate My Professor Lucia Fraiese

Lucia Fraiese is a PhD candidate in Linguistics in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia (UWA), having joined the institution in 2021 initially as a Higher Degree by Research Preliminary student. Her academic background includes a Bachelor of Arts in Higher Education Teaching in English from ISP ‘Dr. Joaquín V. González’ in Buenos Aires, Argentina (GPA 9.20/10), a Cambridge Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) from Curtin University, Western Australia, and a Summer Course in English Phonetics from University College London. With over a decade of teaching experience across secondary and tertiary levels in Argentina, the United States, and Australia, Fraiese currently holds positions at UWA as Research Assistant in the School of Social Sciences (multiple terms including 2024 and 2022), Casual Tutor for courses such as Language and Communication (LING1001) and The Sounds of the World's Languages (LING2002), and English Language teacher at the UWA Centre for English Language Teaching. She also serves as Administrative Assistant for the Linguistics and Language Lab Seminar Series, Mental Health First Aider, and student representative on the Social Sciences Research Committee and Board of Graduate Research.

Her fully funded Doctor of Philosophy research, supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship (2021-2025), constitutes the first sociolinguistic ethnography of First Nations young women in Australian Indigenous boarding schools, exploring how linguistic variation in Australian Aboriginal English constructs social meaning, identity, and bonds while countering deficit ideologies. Core research interests include sociolinguistics, ethnography, style and social meaning, discourse-pragmatics, phonetics and phonology, applied linguistics, and linguistic discrimination. Key publications feature “Freakin’ Swimming and Everythink: School Practices and Variable (ING) in an Australian Indigenous Boarding School” (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2026, with co-authors), “We was goin’ kangaroo shooting: Was/were variation in Australian Aboriginal English” (English World-Wide, 2026, with co-authors), “First Nations women in an Australian boarding school: A sociolinguistic ethnography” (Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2025), “Outta country: The Boarders’ Corpus of Australian Aboriginal English” (Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2026), and the invited book chapter “South to North: Diversity as an academic asset” (Routledge, 2023, with Celeste Rodríguez Louro). Fraiese has earned recognition through the 2025 UWA Three Minute Thesis competition victory, 2025 HASS & Indigenous Research Data Commons Summer School Bursary, 2022 New Ways of Analyzing Variation 50 Student Travel Award, Fulbright Scholarship (2016-2017), UWA Convocation Award, and Graduate Women WA Child Development Scholarship.