Members of this research group are investigating text and discourse - both written and spoken - in a variety of professional and academic social contexts. Within each project we seek to understand the situated nature of text production and use, and the implications for those involved in associated language events.

Our linguistic research connects with pedagogic research in the centre in that its scope extends to the analysis of professional and academic genres with which speakers of English as a second or foreign language must engage. Group members have engaged in the analysis of texts produced for teaching and learning, comparisons of texts produced in different cultural contexts, and the investigation of teacher and learner talk at all educational levels from the primary school to university.

Our approaches to analysis are varied, and include for example computerised investigation of corpora, conversation analysis, genre analysis and systemic functional linguistics.

The Centre for Applied Linguistics has recently led two major projects involving the compilation of large databases of academic texts. The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus is a collection of recordings and transcripts for 200 lectures and seminars from a wide variety of disciplines. The corpus was supported with internal and external funding, including a ‘Resource Enhancement Scheme’ grant from the AHRB. The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus is a collection of proficient student writing supported by funding from the ESRC as part of the project entitled ‘An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British higher education’.

Our regular meetings for term 2 2012 will all take place in H0.44 (Humanties Building).

The schedule is:

Wed 18 Jan 2-3pm Research talk by Sue Wharton: "Presenting a united front: assessed reflective writing on a group experience".

Wed 01 Feb 2-3pm Data sharing session led by Stephanie Schnurr

Wed 15 Feb 2-3pm Research talk by Tilly Harrison and Gerard Sharpling

Wed 29 Feb 2-3pm Research talk by Seongsook Choi and Keith Richards

Wed 14 Mar 2-3pm Research in progress/ Data analysis session, led by Yifan Geng and Sue Wharton. Focusing on the use of the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005) to analyse discussion sections of doctoral theses.

Please see our list of recent publications and events