PhD. Riikka Ullakonoja is currently a post-doctoral researcher in a project Broken Finnish’: Accent perceptions in societal gatekeeping (funded by the Research Council of Finland) at the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has obtained a title of Docent in Language learning, especially oral proficiency and multilingualism at the University of Turku. Her main research focus is second/foreign language learning and assessment, more specifically oral skills and phonetics. She has also studied motivation and learning of reading and writing skills. The subjects of her research projects have been both children and adults: first language speakers of Finnish learning Russian, English and Swedish as well as immigrant background learners of Finnish. In addition, she has also studied immigrant learners. PhD Ullakonoja is also a qualified teacher of Russian, French and English and has authored many international and national scientific articles as well as co-authored a book The Diagnosis of Reading in a Second or Foreign Language and co-edited a book Phonetics of Russian and Finnish. General description of Phonetic Systems. Experimental Studies on Spontaneous and Read-aloud Speech. She is also involved in the Finnish Matriculation Examination and National Certificates of Language Proficiency as a rater-assessor.