Kaisa Pietikäinen first joined the Norwegian School of Economics in 2018 as an externally funded Postdoctoral Fellow, working on a project entitled Linguistic Constellations of Lingua Franca Families – A Longitudinal Inquiry into the Development of Multilingual Practices. In August 2020, she was hired as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication to work on the project Digital collaboration platforms as learning environments in multilingual business communities.

Dr Pietikäinen has a PhD degree in English philology from the University of Helsinki (2017) and an MA degree in Cross-Cultural Communication and Media from Newcastle University (2012). Before her academic career, she worked for several years in the advertising industry as a copywriter.

Dr Pietikäinen’s research interests revolve around the use of English along with other languages and semiotic means in intercultural encounters. She has published in several prestigious journals and publications (e.g., Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics, The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca) on topics such as English as a lingua franca, conversation analysis, pragmatics, and multilingualism.

Her current research project Digital collaboration platforms as learning environments in multilingual business communities investigates how and what kinds of linguistic and multimodal practices are acquired on a digital platform at a multinational IT company. The project provides novel insights into how contemporary multilingual workforce juggle between multiple parallel tasks and online communication channels while acquiring, using and adapting linguistic, discursive and multimodal practices. The project answers a call for a more holistic research approach that takes multilingualism into consideration in second language acquisition studies, while engaging with the entirety of semiotic forms which contribute to meaning-making.

Dr Pietikäinen’s externally funded research project Linguistic Constellations of Lingua Franca Families – A Longitudinal Inquiry into the Development of Multilingual Practices examined the use of English and multilingualism in families where the parents predominantly used non-native English as their shared lingua franca. It compared the reported family language policies which the parents shared in interviews to the families’ actual linguistic practices recorded in their naturally occurring conversations. The project was funded by The Alfred Kordelin Foundation and The Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Dr Pietikäinen is also involved in several international research collaborations such as in editing a special issue Conversation Analytic Insights from English as a Lingua Franca for Journal of Pragmatics and working with researchers from Trier University of Applied Sciences on a project that investigates turn-taking practices in intercultural interactions. At NHH, she teaches at the English for Business courses.

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