Barbara Seidlhofer

Barbara Seidlhofer is an Austrian applied linguist and retired professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna. She is regarded as one of the founding figures of the research field of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and is the founding director of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), the first general corpus of spoken ELF. In 2021 she received the Wilhelm Hartel Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in recognition of her life's work.

Education and career Seidlhofer studied English and Italian at the University of Vienna, qualifying as a secondary school teacher and completing her Magister degree in 1982. She then went to the Institute of Education, University of London, where she obtained an MA in Language and Literature in Education in 1984 and a PhD in Applied Linguistics in 1991 under the supervision of Henry Widdowson. Her doctoral thesis, Approaches to Summarization: Discourse Analysis and Language Education, was published in 1995.

Seidlhofer returned to the University of Vienna, where she completed her Habilitation in English Linguistics in 2001. She is widely credited with identifying the "conceptual gap" in the study of English – the absence of systematic descriptions of English as it is used by speakers of different first languages as a lingua franca – in a seminal 2001 article in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, which has been cited over 2,000 times. VOICE was released online in 2009 (version 1.0) and later as an XML version (2.0) in 2013, and has subsequently been re-released as VOICE 3.0 through the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH). VOICE inspired the creation of other major ELF corpora, including the ELFA corpus at the University of Helsinki and the Asian Corpus of English (ACE). Her other major publications include:

Controversies in Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2003) Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics: Studies in Honour of H. G. Widdowson (co-edited with Guy Cook; Oxford University Press, 1995) Pronunciation (co-authored with Christiane Dalton; in the series Language Teaching: A Scheme for Teacher Education; Oxford University Press, 1994) "Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca", Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 24, 209–239 (2004)

According to Google Scholar, Seidlhofer's publications have received over 21,000 citations, and she has an h-index of 47.