Jean Chavula (Malawi)

Dr Jean Josephine Chavula is a Citumbuka Language Specialist and a Lecturer in general linguistics in the department of African Languages and Linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities. Jean holds a PhD in Linguistics from Leiden University (The Netherlands) and a MA in Pure Linguistics from University of Malawi. She has also served as Deputy Director at the Centre and Deputy head of department in the African Languages and Linguistics department. She has extensive experience in language research, editing and translation. She has been involved in several projects including the Language Atlas for Malawi and the HIV and AIDS and language use in Malawi, and creation of grammatical terms for Citumbuka. She has conducted extensive research in Malawian languages. She has served as Acting Director of the Centre for Language Studies. She is chief compiler of the first ever Citumbuka monolingual dictionary published in December 2018 under the MaLex project, which also benefited from UNESCO funding under intangible cultural heritage Between November 2018 and June 2019 she led the team investigating the effect of English-only instruction on skill formation and labour market readiness of young Malawians. Dr Chavula is a member of the research team in the UNESCO Chair GRTA family literacy project.