Marissa E Kwan Lin

Marissa E Kwan Lin

Fellow

Marissa E Kwan Lin is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for English Language Communication (CELC) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She has published and presented in the areas of social semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis, multiliteracies and the use of multimodality for educational purposes.

She is currently Coordinator of the University Town Writing Programme (UTWP), a rhetorically intensive, content specific writing programme that aims to engage students in scholarly discussions and debates on topics that are of social interest and relevance.

In her time at CELC, she has developed, coordinated and taught on a range of courses from undergraduate academic writing and communication modules to graduate level academic literacy courses.

Marissa is also an active researcher and recently published a monograph with Routledge entitled Discourses of Neoliberalism in Singapore's Higher Education Context: Individualist and Communitarian Perspectives, and a co-edited book Discourses, Modes, Media and Meaning in an Era of Pandemic: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Approach.

She also serves as reviewer for peer-reviewed journals like Journal of Pragmatics, Social Semiotics, Pragmatics and Society and Frontiers in Communication.

I have always been inspired by the teachers who have shaped my educational journey. I was never an outstanding student, but I had teachers who made it a point to help me be the best I could be, especially when things became challenging. 

These experiences have shaped how I think about teaching and learning. I am especially interested in student engagement and how this can be effectively deployed and cultivated for each unique individual who comes into my classroom. As a multimodal discourse analyst with a research background in the digital humanities, I seek to engage students using a variety of modes and modalities, both technological and non-technological. I am also focused on engagement in a holistic way, which means being interested in how each individual student acts cognitively, psychologically and socially in the learning context of my course.  

I thus aspire, as a teacher, to engage my students so they can make the most of their learning endeavours, leveraging their intellectual, psychological and social skills to help them ask the questions that most intrigue and matter to them, as well as teaching them scholarly ways to work towards possible and plausible answers to those questions.  

Teaching Awards and Recognition 

  • Residential Colleges Digital Education Award 2023 
  • NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award 2022 
  • Residential Colleges Teaching Excellence Award 2022 
  • CELC Teaching Commendation Award 2020