Dr Crayton Walker BEd, RSA Dip. TEFL, MA, PhD

 

Lecturer

Department of English

Photograph of Dr Crayton Walker

Contact details

Telephone +44 (0)121 414 3533

Email c.p.walker@bham.ac.uk

JG Smith Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

About

I am a lecturer working in the English Language Department. I mainly work with the postgraduate students who are following our on-campus and distance programmes. My main areas of expertise are associated with corpus linguistics and language teaching.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor of Education, University of Southampton, 1979
  • Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Royal Society of Arts, 1980
  • Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics, University of Essex, 1985
  • Doctor of Philosophy (English), University of Birmingham, 2008

Biography

I have been working in the English Department at the University of Birmingham since 2006. Before joining the University I had a career in English language teaching. I taught ESP in London, Riyadh and Stuttgart and was in charge of the English department of a large language school in Germany for over 10 years.

Teaching

I teach on both the in-house and distance MA programmes in TEFL/ESL and Applied Linguistics.

I currently run courses on

  • syllabus and materials design,
  • computer assisted language learning (CALL),
  • language teaching methodology,
  • the theory and practice of teaching lexico-grammar.

I also supervise MA and PhD students in the area of corpus linguistics and classroom methodology.

Postgraduate supervision

I am interested in supervising MA and PhD research in the areas of:

  • collocation and other phraseological aspects of English
  • the pedagogic application of corpora
  • vocabulary and the teaching of vocabulary

Research

My research interests are associated with the study of collocation and other phraseological aspects of English. I am currently using corpus-based techniques to investigate the phraseological behaviours of high frequency nouns and verbs and looking at how these are represented in mainstream EFL coursebooks.

I also co-ordinate a knowledge transfer project developing games designed to help learners acquire some of the most frequent collocations. These will run on computers and smart phones.

Crayton talks about his research into collocation

Other activities

  • One of the organizers of the Corpus Linguistics Conference to be held at the University in July 2011
  • Welfare Officer for the English Language department (Distance Programme).
  • External Examiner for the University of Warwick.
  • Reviewer for Routledge and for the ESP Journal.

Publications

  • Walker, C. 2007. Factors which influence the process of collocation. In Boers, F & Lindstromberg, S (Eds), Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 291-308.
  • Walker, C. 2009. The treatment of collocation by learners’ dictionaries, collocational dictionaries and dictionaries of business English. International Journal of Lexicography, 22/3, 281-299.
  • Walker, C. 2010. How a corpus study of the factors which influence collocation can help in the teaching of business English. ESP Journal. 10.1016/j.esp.2010.12.003.
  • Walker, C. 2011. A corpus-based study of the linguistic features and processes which influence the way collocations are formed: Some implications for the learning of collocations. TESOL Quarterly.
  • Walker, C. (forthcoming). How collocation is influenced by the use of metaphor. In Juchem-Grundman, C. & Niemeier, S. (Eds), Knowing is Seeing: Metaphor and Language Pedagogy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

Expertise

English Language, especially issues with contemporary usage; English Language Teaching,  especially in the area of vocabulary and the teaching of vocabulary; Lexis & Collocation Corpus Lingusitics.

Expertise

English Language, especially issues with contemporary usage; English Language Teaching,  especially in the area of vocabulary and the teaching of vocabulary; Lexis & Collocation Corpus Lingusitics.

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