Dr Brigita Séguis

Dr Brigita Séguis

Senior Research Manager

Brigita is a Senior Research Manager at Cambridge English, where she leads on research activities related to test development, validation and impact evaluations. Her areas of expertise/interest include the Occupational English Test (OET), medical education, standard setting, multilingualism and corpus linguistics. She is also a member of the Cambridge English Listening Skills group. Brigita has published and presented on various topics which include clinical communication, assessment of productive skills, setting and maintaining performance standards and test validation. She has also collaborated on joint research projects with external organisations and medical regulators. She holds a DPhil in Linguistics from the University of Oxford.

Prior to joining Cambridge English, Brigita gave tutorials in sociolinguistics and academic writing at the University of Oxford and was a visiting lecturer at University College London. She also worked as a Bilingual Health Advocate for the NHS.

Brigita is an avid linguist and is fluent in five languages. In her spare time she enjoys reading, travelling and baking with her children.

Key publications and conference presentations

Séguis, B. & Lim, G. 2020. "The Writing that Nurses Do: Investigating Changes to Standards over Time”. To be published in: Knoch, Maqueen, Elder (eds.) Assessing Writing Special Issue: Assessing Writing for Workplace Purposes. Elsevier.

Séguis, B. & Johnson, S. (2020) Conference Paper “Assessing Clinical Communication Skills on a Healthcare-specific English Language Test”. International Conference on Communication in Healthcare Online, 9-11 September 2020.

Séguis, B. (2019) Conference Paper "Demonstrating Empathy on the Speaking Component of a Healthcare-specific English Language Test". International Conference on Communication in Healthcare, San Diego, USA, 26-31 October 2019.

Séguis, B., Saville, W. (2019) Conference Paper "Assessing Health Professionals: Measuring Language Ability and Clinical Communication on OET". English for Healthcare Conference - EALTHY, Castellon, Spain, 3-4 October 2019.

Séguis, B. (2019) Conference Paper "Assessing Writing in the Healthcare Context". OSCE Facilitators’ Conference, Newport, Wales, 13 September 2019.

Séguis, B. 2019. "Assessing Language Ability and Clinical Communication on the OET". Published in: Bell, M. L. (ed.) Testing, Evaluation and Assessment Today. IATEFL.

Séguis, B., Perrett, D. (2019) Conference Paper "Assessing Vocabulary: Generating Test Items Using Cambridge Learner Corpus". Vocab@Leuven Conference, Leuven, Belgium, 1-3 July 2019.

Séguis, B., Stevenson, L. (2019) Conference Paper "Assessing Health Professionals: What Counts as Effective Communication?". IATEFL, Liverpool, UK, 2-5 April 2019.

Lim, G., Zhang, B., Séguis, B. (2019) Conference Paper "Not unwarranted concordances but warranted convergences: Validating standards on an ESP test using subject matter experts". 41st Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC), Atlanta, USA, 4-8 March 2019.

Séguis, B., Lim, G. (2019) Conference Paper "Assessing clinical communication on the Occupational English Test: The intersection of cognitive and consequential validity". 41st Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC), Atlanta, USA, 4-8 March 2019.

Séguis, B. & McElwee, S. (2018) “Assessing clinical communication skills on the Occupational English Test”. Published in: Papageorgiou, S., & Bailey, K. M. (eds.) Global Perspective on Language Assessment. New York, NY: Routledge.

McElwee, S., Lopes, S., Séguis, B., Cheung, K. (2018) Conference Paper "Investigating the predictive validity of a selection instrument over time – A case study of the BioMedical Admissions Test (BMAT) at a UK university". An International Association for Medical Education (AMEE) Conference, Basel, Switzerland, 25-29 August 2018.

Zhang, B., Séguis, B., Lim, G. (2018) Conference Paper "Towards improved clinical communication: An overview of the updated version of the Occupational English Test (OET)". 40th Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC), University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, 4-6 July 2018.

Séguis, B. (2018) Plenary Talk "Language assessment of health professionals: The issue of communicative competence". ALTE 51st Meeting and Conference, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 13 April 2018.