Marinella Caruso is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia, where she teaches in the Italian Studies program. She has published on language contact, Italian in a migratory context, second language acquisition and the scholarship of teaching and learning. More recently her attention has turned to language policy, particularly issues of accessibility of language study at university and continuity in language education. She is the author of Italian language attrition in Australia. The verb system, Franco Angeli, Milan, 2010. 

At UWA Marinella is responsible for the first-year cohort and teaches specialist courses on Italian linguistics and Italian cinema. She is part of the university-wide Community of Practice focussing on innovative ways of promoting active learning, and has worked on projects on online feedback, adaptive and mobile learning and the flipped approach. Marinella’s current projects are related to language learner motivation among university students and high school students using Q methodology.