Sebastian Feller

From Future Worlds Center Wiki
Degree(s) MA in English Philology
PhD in English Linguistics
University(ies) University of Muenster, Germany
Specialization(s) interaction pragmatics, dialog and discourse analysis, teacher-learner interaction research, cognitive and action-theoretical theories of meaning, corpus and computational linguistics, intercultural communication, social media studies, communication studies, human-machine interaction and social robotics



Sebastian has a combined doctoral degree in theoretical linguistics and philosophy. He is currently a member of the Intuitive Interaction Technologies Group at the Institute of High Performance Computing under the Agency of Science, Technology, and Research, Singapore. He models machine-learner interactions, which combine linguistic, psychological, and neurodidactical research insights.

Sebastian’s research interests scope over a vast array of areas in and around linguistics including cognitive theories of meaning, dialog analysis, corpus linguistics and quantitative linguistics, intercultural communication, and classroom interaction research.


Short bio

He has hands-on experience as a school teacher, teaching classes in English, history, geography, and philosophy at secondary schools in Germany. As university lecturer he has taught a variety of modules in linguistics including corpus linguistics, theories of language learning, and English as a global language, to name a few. Next to his main research work, Sebastian is assistant editor for the journal Language and Dialogue and the book series Dialogue Studies both under Benjamins, as well as advising editor for the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures. He is also Secretary of the International Association of Dialogue Analysis.


Selected publications

• Feller, S. & Yengin, I. (Eds). (2013). 21st Century Education: Constructing meaning and building knowledge in technology supported learning environments. Netherlands: John Benjamins.
• Feller, S. (2013). [Review of the book Educational Technologies for Teaching Argumentation Skills, ed. by Nils Pinkwart, and Bruce M. McLaren.] Language and Dialogue, 3(2), 313-317.
• Feller, S. (in press). Conceptual change in language teaching and learning. Why and how lexical concepts drive meaning construction differently across languages. Theory and Practice in Language Studies.
• Feller, S. (2012). Recent developments in HCI: The implementation of cultural models in human computer interaction. Language and Dialogue, 2(3), 465-478.
• Feller, S. (2012). Facilitating active learning in the form of conceptual change through virtual worlds. In C. A. Shoniregun, & G. A. Akamayeva (Eds.), Proceedings of the London International Conference on Education (LICE) 2012, London (pp. 389-394). London: Infonomics Society.
• Feller, S. (2012). The nature of dialog. Structural and lexical markers of dialogic teacher-learner interactions. In J. Wenyu (Ed.), Proceedings of Workshop at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2012, Singapore (pp. 73-76). New York: ACM.
• Feller, S. (2011). Language use and the lexicon. Language and Dialogue, 1(1), 129-145.