I am a Research Fellow at the School of Education at the University of Leeds, and a member of the Centre for Language Education Research (CLER) which is housed within the School.
Broadly speaking, my research interests are in:
- corpus linguistics,
- applied linguistics, and
- language (in) education.
Currently, I am focussing on creating opportunities for corpus methods to inform issues of language in mainstream UK education, working primarily with Professor Alice Deignan. I also maintain an interest in representations of sexuality in public discourse and ‘bad language’.
I am part of the research team that was responsible for the compilation of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014): a new, 10-million-word corpus of informal spoken English, which was made publicly available in 2017. 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 challenges encountered in the compilation of the Spoken BNC2014 and presents an initial linguistic analysis 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.
You can find my Google Scholar profile here.
