Rate My Professor Maria Herke

Dr. Maria Herke is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics in the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences at Macquarie University. She earned her PhD in Systemic Functional Linguistics, Corpus and the Consumers: Exploring Theoretical and Technological Potential from Macquarie University in 2007, a BA with First Class Honours titled Transposing Culture: A Tri-Stratal Exploration of the Meaning Making of Two Cultures in 2002, and holds Senior Fellow status with the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) awarded in 2018. Her academic career at Macquarie University encompasses teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in areas such as text analysis, grammar and meaning, forensic linguistics, genre, discourse, multimodality, and language for specific purposes. She has served as unit convenor and lecturer for units including LING3391 Forensic Linguistics, APPL8010 Genre, Discourse and Multimodality, and Language and Culture in the Workplace.

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.