She is a graduate of PhD in Applied Linguistics, Distinction, from De La Salle University – Manila. The research interests of Dr. Shirley Dita include Austronesian linguistics, Philippine languages, World Englishes, syntax, Corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis. She has presented papers in national and international conferences here and abroad. She has also published some of her research papers. Currently, she is involved in a corpus-building project of Philippine languages.