Hi there and welcome, person(s) from the internet 😁

I'm Annette (or Hui Zhao, if you want to practise your Mandarin. But really, Annette is just fine). This is my 2022 attampt to make this website a bit less serious and a bit more... me!

I'm currently a researcher at Jigsaw, a social enterprise working in international education, and I work on various research and evaluation projects to do with education and sometimes even languages!

Before this, I was a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham from 2017 to 2021). My project there looked at language variation and multilingualism in Shanghai and Ningbo, China, as part of the Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS) project. I also taught (very briefly for a sememster in 2021) sociolinguistics at Newman University, Birmingham.

I finished my PhD in (socio)linguistics at the Linguistics Department at Queen Mary University of London, funded by the London Social Science ESRC Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) on an Advanced Quantitative Methods (AQM) studentship. I have a BA in English from South-Central University for Nationalities [中南民族大学] in Wuhan, China and an MA in Linguistics from Queen Mary.