I am a Research Fellow at the School of Education at the University of Leeds, specialising in applied and corpus linguistics.
My research interests are:
- (Applied) corpus linguistics
- Methods in compiling spoken corpora
- Lexical/grammatical variation in spoken British English
I am part of the research team that was responsible for the compilation of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014): a new, 11.5 million word corpus of informal, real-life spoken British English, which was made publicly available in 2017 via Lancaster University’s CQPweb server. Visit the BNC2014 project website for more information about the project, including access to the corpus.
From 2014-2017 I completed my PhD at the ESRC funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, under the supervision of Professor Tony McEnery. My PhD thesis investigates the methodological issues encountered in the compilation of the Spoken BNC2014 and presents some initial linguistic analyses of the data, with a focus on ‘bad language’. Prior to this, I received a BA Hons Linguistics (first) from Lancaster University (2010-2013) followed by an MA Language and Linguistics (distinction) from Lancaster University (2013-2014).
I regularly do consultancy for the Cambridge University Press ELT research group, using corpora to report on recent lexical and grammatical changes in spoken British English.
I have worked as a Senior Research Manager in the Research and Thought Leadership Group at Cambridge Assessment English (2017-18), working on the development of the Cambridge Learner Corpus.
You can download my CV here.
