Shirley N. Dita
Shirley N. Dita is an Associate Professor and currently Chair of the Department of English and Applied Linguistics of De La Salle University, Manila, the Philippines[1]. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics (with distinction). Prior to her appointment as Department Chair, she was the Director of the Lasallian Institute for Development and Educational Research (LIDER) from 2016 to 2022. She was also a Visiting Professor at the School of Education, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa from August to September in 2016; a Visiting Contributing Scholar at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Center (SSSHARC), University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in July 2018; a Visiting Scholar at University of Macau, Macau SAR China in December 2018; a Visiting Professor at the Universitas Sumatera Utara, Indonesia from April to May in 2023; and currently a Visiting Academic at the University of Saint Joseph, Macau SAR China.
Dr. Dita has held various key positions in international and Philippine organizations. Currently, she sits in the executive boards of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society (SEALS)[2], the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea (SSK)[3], the International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (ICAL)[4], and the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC)[5]. She was the former Executive Secretary of the Asian Association of Lexicography (ASIALEX), where she also served as Board Member from 2013 to 2019[6]. Dr. Dita has been part of the Executive Board of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines (LSP)[7] for many years, serving as President from 2015 to 2018 as well as various other positions until today.
Dr. Dita also sits in the editorial boards of various journal and book series in the Philippines and around the world: New Directions in World Englishes Research book series, published by the Edinburgh University Press[8], Journal of Modern Languages (JML) published by the University of Malaya[9], the Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics[10], Languages in Global Contexts published by Equinox[11], the Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS) published by the University of Santo Tomas[12], the Journal of English and Applied Linguistics (JEAL) published by De La Salle University[13], to name a few.
To date, Dr. Dita has convened various international conferences. She is the Conference Director of the biennial International Conference on Applied Linguistics and Language Education (ICALLE)[14] organized by the Department of English and Applied Linguistics, Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education, De La Salle University. Likewise, she is convening the 16th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (16ICAL) happening on June 20-24, 2024[15]. She was the Organizer of the Action Research, Action Learning (ARAL) from 2017 to 2022[16] and other international conferences such as PACLIC, ASIALEX, SEALS, Free Linguistics Conference (FLC), among others.
Dr. Dita’s research has focused on the description of Philippine languages by looking at their phonology, morphology, and syntax. She worked on the reference grammar of Ibanag[17] for her doctoral dissertation and has supervised a number of doctoral students who documented Philippine languages following the descriptive and methodological framework she did for Ibanag. She has completed various projects on Philippine languages such as building the corpus of Philippine languages, and lexicography, among others. Likewise, she has published extensively on world Englishes and corpus linguistics. She has also given various plenary lectures, workshops, and themed panels on these topics as well as supervised graduate students on the description of varieties of English using corpus-based techniques.
For her exemplary work in Philippine languages and linguistics, the Linguistic Society of the Philippines and De La Salle University awarded her the Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC Distinguished Professorial Chair in Linguistics and Language Education in 2020[18]. Dr. Dita’s work — her research and advocacy — has been not only to document the minority languages and less explored language varieties but, more so, to ensure that linguistics and social science education and scholarship reach those in the margins and the peripheries because, to her, languages and cultures are central to sustainable development and social transformation.
