Mario Franco Barros is an Assistant Professor [Professsor Auxiliar] at the University of Madeira (Uma) and a Researcher at the Centre for Communication and Culture Studies of the Portuguese Catholic University (UCP). He has published several articles in different European countries in the areas of his line of research, especially in text linguistics, spoken language, digital communication, language of proximity and distance and lexicography. In 2009, together with Bernd Sieberg, he organised the conference "Proximidade e Distância na Língua e Cultura" (Franco/Sieberg 2011). In 2012, he co-organised together with António Chenoll, Bernd Sieberg and Verena Lindemann at the UCP, the international conference: “SPEAKING: Teaching Oral Communication Skills in Foreign Languages”. In 2019, co-organised with Joaquim Pinheiro and Samuel Mateus the "XI Congresso SOPCOM Comunicação, Turismo e Cultura", which took place at the UMa (Pinheiro/Mateus/Franco Barros 2020). He participated in several international projects: From 2013-2015 he was a member of the research project "Elaboración de un diccionario conceptual del español y alemán online" (DICONALE-online) (USC, coordinated by Meike Meliss). From 2016-2019 he was a member of the research project COMBIDIGILEX (USC, coordinated by Meike Meliss and Inmaculada Mas). From 2019-2020 he was a member of the research project "La Organización de la Información en los Discurso Orales en su Variación Genérica: Estudio Contrastivo Alemán vs. Español/Portugués/Catalán" (University of Valencia, Spain, coordinated by F. Robles i Sabater). In 2005, 2012-2013 and in 2015-2018 he has collaborated in three international projects at the University of Hannover ("Sprachliche und textuelle Merkmale in Weblogs", Microblogs global, "Nicknamen international"), Germany, coordinated by Peter Schlobinki and Torsten Siever (2005, 2013, 2018).