About

Armanda Stroia is an ELT teacher educator, researcher and materials writer with nearly two decades of experience in English language teaching. She is the Head of the Foreign Languages Department at “Avram Iancu” School and a teacher trainer at Teachers’ Training Centre Cluj in Romania.

Her work explores the intersections of language, media, technology, and education, bringing together research, teacher education, and materials development. Alongside her research and teaching, Armanda contributes to the wider ELT community as Joint Events Coordinator for IATEFL’s Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG). She also collaborates with international educational organisations and publishers on teacher education programmes, conference sessions, and professional development initiatives.

Her research journey began with an interest in language and media discourse. She completed her PhD in Philology in 2020, graduating summa cum laude, with doctoral research examining linguistic clichés in contemporary Romanian mass media.

During her doctoral studies, she was awarded an Erasmus+ doctoral scholarship in Italy, at the Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale. Her doctoral research was subsequently published as the monograph Linguistic Clichés in Contemporary Romanian Mass Media (Mega Publishing House, 2021). This work sparked a broader interest in the ways language, media, and representation shape how people make sense of the world.

Her current research explores critical media literacy, digital communication, multimodal meaning-making, ecomedia pedagogy, AI-mediated language education, and learner agency. She is particularly interested in how learners can develop more critical and agentive ways of engaging with the media and technologies that are woven into their everyday lives.

Armanda is also involved in collaborative research and professional projects exploring emerging issues in language education, including generative AI, AI avatars, multimodality and ecomedia pedagogy.

She is driven by a strong interest in connecting research with meaningful classroom practices and in developing materials that are both pedagogically useful and responsive to learners’ media-rich lives. Whether through teaching, research, materials writing or international collaboration, she is interested in one central question: how can English language education help learners become more thoughtful, critical and agentive participants in the world around them?

Her publications include the monograph Linguistic Clichés in Contemporary Romanian Mass Media, peer-reviewed journal articles, and book chapters, including work published by IGI Global and forthcoming chapters with Springer Nature and John Benjamins. She has presented research and delivered invited talks, keynotes, and teacher education workshops across Europe, North America, and Central Asia, including at the TESOL International Convention, IATEFL, and AsiaTEFL.

Away from ELT and research, Armanda enjoys travelling, exploring new cultures, and discovering places through photography. She particularly enjoys catching sunrises, finding new landscapes to photograph, and, at the other end of the spectrum, slowing down with a good book in her hammock or by the sea. These experiences and quieter moments provide a welcome counterbalance to the pace of academic and professional life.