Rate My Professor Maria Herke

A systemic functional sociolinguist, Maria Herke specializes in lexical, grammatical, and semantic variation across contexts, with a focus on appliable linguistics to address social issues. She applies Systemic Functional Linguistics expertise in forensic and health communication contexts, and more recently in academic and professional communication. Employing primarily qualitative research augmented by corpus-assisted quantitative methods, she leads the Lit@MQ corpus project, a cross-disciplinary collaboration producing a longitudinal collection of spoken and written undergraduate student assignments to measure literacy levels and development. Her research contributions include projects such as the Emergency Department Communication (EDCOM) project (2007-2010), Scamseek for detecting internet financial scams (2002-2004), and Developing Effective Communication in Sexual and Reproductive Health Consultations (2008). Key publications comprise textbooks co-authored with colleagues: Academic Success: A Student's Guide to Studying at University (Red Globe Press, 2019), Academic Culture: A Student's Guide to Studying at University (4th ed., Red Globe Press, 2020), AMEG Academic Culture: A Student's Guide to Studying at University (Shandong Education Press/Macmillan, 2018); articles such as Public Discourse Syndrome: Reformulating for Clarity (Text & Talk, 2017, with Skopal); and book chapters including Using Experiential Learning Theory as a Framework for Undergraduate Academic Communication Development (University of Toronto Press, 2022, with Hoadley and Wong). She has received the University Medal (2002) and Delbridge Prize (2000). Her work supports student academic success and professional communication training through textbooks and corpus resources.