Elizabeth Thomson (linguist)
Elizabeth A. Thomson (born 1961) is an Australian linguist. She is an adjunct professor at Charles Sturt University and a Principal Honorary Fellow at the University of Wollongong.
Her work covers linguistics, language education and training, languages other than English, and how curriculums and assessments are designed. She specializes in English and Japanese using systemic functional linguistics.
She helped found the Japan Association of Systemic Functional Linguistics and is involved with ISFLA, ASFLA, CAULLT, and ACODE. She studied at Macquarie University (BA in Linguistics, 1984) and completed intensive Japanese studies the same year. She earned an MA in Applied Linguistics/TESOL from the University of Sydney in 1988, a PhD in Education from the University of Wollongong in 2002, and an MPhil from UNSW Canberra in 2014. She also completed a Graduate Certificate in Wiradjuri Language and Culture in 2017.
She speaks Japanese and Wiradjuri and is a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy.
Thomson has contributed to systemic functional linguistics, especially for Japanese, and has taught in Japan and at Wollongong. She has studied text coherence in Japanese across genres such as news, education, literature and workplace language, and helped create an Academic Writing CD-ROM with a workbook. She led curriculum redesign for the Defence Force School of Languages (2008–2012) and conducted Defence language and culture research as a 2013 Secretary of Defence Fellow.
In 2018 she led curriculum innovations at Charles Sturt University, earning a Global Teaching Excellence Award commendation for strong curriculum design and online education support.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:23 (CET).