Dr Aye has been with Swinburne since 2009, and as Associate Dean, she is in charge of curriculum enhancement and accreditation of courses offered by the Faculty of Language and Communication. Prior to joining Swinburne, she started her teaching career at a tertiary level in 1986 and taught English (language, literature and linguistics) to undergraduate and postgraduate students. She is currently teaching MA (TESOL) units.
Dr Aye obtained her PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2006 and her research looked at the history, grammar and contact features of Singapore Bazaar Malay, the former lingua franca of the multilingual community of Singapore. Her MA research, carried out in Brunei, focused on an analysis of errors found in the written production of Myanmar learners of Malay working in Brunei, to feed into teaching Malay as a foreign language to Myanmar learners.
Dr Aye’s research interests include linguistic changes induced by language contact, the influence of substrate language on the emerging contact language, learner language, learner errors and the influence of learners’ first language. She is also passionate about describing languages to which little academic attention has been given.