Michael Sharwood Smith

I'm a much travelled author, academic, artist, trumpet player, flight simulator fan and salsa dancer. My interests are wide-ranging but my professional career as a teachers and researcher has centred for most of the time on language, what language is .its many uses and how language and any other type of knowledge is formed and processed in the mind.. In recent years I have been focusing more and more on language as a window onto the human mind and that in turn has led to the topic of my most recent book, the Mind Revealed. I have thereby ended up as a researcher in the family of disciplines called 'cognitive science'.. My current affiliation is Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. Born in South Africa, educated in England and after graduating from St Andrews University, Scotland, I taught English in and France and Sweden before completing a postgraduate diploma in Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University. I was a British Council senior lecturer in Poznan, Poland where I obtained a PhD in English Linguistics and after which I worked in the Netherlands (Utrecht) for twenty five years, lecturing, carrying out research, co-founding and running the Second Language Research journal, organising a series of international symposia, helping to set up the European Second Language Association as its first vice president and publishing over a hundred articles and books in the process.