• PhD in Applied Linguistics, Reading
• MA in TEFL, Reading
• PGCE, York
• BA in English & Related Literature, York

I took up the post of Director of the Centre for Corpus Research at Birmingham in September 2009, after working for thirteen years as a lecturer in EAP/Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading. I had taught in Kenya (one year) and Japan (fourteen years) before moving to Reading in 1996 to do doctoral research.

• I convene the BA module: 'Language for Literature'.
• I also co-teach the MA module, 'Corpus Assisted Language Learning' which runs in the Spring Semester.

I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students in the areas of:

• corpus linguistics
• applications of corpus-based approaches to language description, particularly in education
• applications of IT in language teaching

I am currently supervising the following PhD students:

• Sarah Alzeer: A Framework for Word List Evaluation (joint supervision with Amanda Patten)
• Liwen Bing: A Longitudinal Study of the Disciplinary Writing Development of Chinese Students in a UK University: Writing Development from a Dynamic System Theory Perspective  (joint supervision with Amanda Patten)
• Mark De Boer: 'Tool-mediated learning'
• Eyad Ekram: 'A comparison of push and pull modes of delivery in teaching vocabulary using Whatsapp'
• Yasin Goktas: ‘Evaluation of mobile technologies in teaching spoken English in a Turkish context’
• Nurcan Ileri: 'Lexical phrases in research article and PhD thesis abstracts in Applied Linguistics and Psychology'
• Eric Jego: 'Medical Interview English Education at Japanese Medical Universities' (joint supervision with Nicholas Groom)
• Cristina Lara: Morphological competition in English word-formation (University of Granada, joint supervision with Salvador Valera Hernandez)
• Maryam Nasseri: 'Lexical and syntactic complexity in Iranian and British/non-British Master’s Theses' (joint supervision with Bodo Winter)
• Susie Oswald: 'Perceptions of English as a Lingua Franca in a Swiss Context'
• Cynthia Quinn: 'Learner concordancing and L2 writing'

I have supervised the following to successful completion of their doctorates:

• Eman Al-Ajaji, 2016 (Birmingham): 'Self representation in student academic writing: a comparative study' (joint supervision with Suganthi John)
• Nourah Al-Alaji, 2016 (Birmingham): 'How medical students express their attitudes towards their reflective experience in teaching hospitals: a corpus-based approach to the analysis of evaluation in reflective reports'
• Manal Al-Makoshi, 2014 (Birmingham): 'Discourse markers and code-switching: Academic medical lectures in Saudi Arabia using English as the Medium of Instruction' (joint supervision with Crayton Walker)
• Miguel Angel Benitez Castro, 2013 (Granada): 'Formal, syntactic, semantic  and textual features of English shell nouns' (joint supervision with Salvador Valera Hernandez)
• Howard Brown, 2017 (Birmingham): 'Getting Started with English-medium Instruction in Japan: Key Factors in Program Planning and Implementation'
• Andy Cresswell, 2010 (Reading): ‘Textual metadiscourse in research articles and student essays : a corpus investigation using discourse tagging’ (joint supervision with Clare Furneaux)
• Marianne Cronin, 2018 (Birmingham) ‘Feck off!’ Exploring the relationship between impoliteness, laughter and humour in the British-Irish sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd (joint supervision with Michael Toolan)
• David Giannoni, 2009 (Reading): 'A corpus-based investigation of the academic value system'. Published as 'Mapping Academic Values in the Disciplines: A Corpus-Based Approach' Bern: Peter Lang
• Barry Grossman, 2017 (Birmingham): 'A corpus approach to metaphorically-construed self-awareness in reflexive constructions'
• Yoko Hirata, 2017 (Birmingham): 'Facilitating communication-oriented activities through data-driven learning'
• Shuangling [Susie] Li, 2015 (Birmingham): 'A corpus-based study of the high frequency nouns 'time' and 'thing': Investigating the role of phraseology in the construction of meaning in discourse' (joint supervision with Crayton Walker)
• Lu Yang, 2006 (Reading):  'A discourse analytic study of EFL test-takers' spoken discourse competence and its impact on their oral proficiency and spoken grammatical competence' (joint supervision with Pauline Robinson)
• Shih Pei-Chun, 2011 (Birmingham): 'Cross-linguistic Transference of Politeness Phenomena'
• Judith Roads, 2015 (Birmingham): 'The distinctiveness of Quaker prose, 1650-1699: a corpus-based enquiry' (joint supervision with Hugh Adlington)
• Mehrdad Sepehri, 2015 (Birmingham): 'The effects of data driven learning on Iranian EFL learners' writing skills development'
• Catherine Spargo, 2010 (Reading): 'A corpus-based study of the semantics of the core modals MAY and CAN in human resource management texts'
• Alastair Stone, 2012 (Reading): 'Evolving identity - changing discourse: and examination of the representation of Slovene national identity in the leading daily newspaper during the transition from Yugoslav republic to an independent state'
• Robert Stroud, 2018 (University of Birmingham): 'An analysis of task-based learning through a virtual learning environment' (joint supervision with Caroline Tagg)
• Nawel Toumi, 2012 (Reading):  'A comparative study of reflexive metadiscourse research articles: An EAP perspective, with implications for teaching writing to EAP learners at tertiary level in Tunisia'. Published as: Reflexive Metadiscourse in L1 and FL English Scholars Press
• Aleksandar Trklja, 2013 (Birmingham): 'A corpus linguistics study of translation semantic fields in English and German' (joint supervision with Wolfgang Teubert)
• Linda Weinberg, 2010 (Reading): 'A contextual study of language learner autonomy and motivation in a technology-enhanced EAP course'

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Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

With Susan Hunston, I was Principal Investigator on an ESRC project (ES/K007300/1) on 'Investigating interdisciplinary research discourse: the case of Global Environmental Change', August 2013 to November 2015.

With Alison Sealey and Mike Scott, I worked on an ESRC project (R000223900), 'An investigation into corpus-based learning about language in the primary school', June 2002 to May 2004.

With Hilary Nesi, a lecture and seminar recording project, the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, funded by a Resource Enhancement grant from the Arts and Humanities Board (RE/AN6806/APN13545), April 2002 to March 2005.

With Hilary Nesi, Sheena Gardner and Paul Wickens, an ESRC funded project, "An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British Higher Education" (RES-000-23-0800), December 2004 to November 2007. The major output of this project was the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus.

My research interests are in academic and other specialised discourses, in the linguistic aspects of human-computer interaction, in uses of educational technologies in language learning, and in the exploitation of corpus resources and methodologies in learning about language.

• Co-Editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2009-2018)
• Member, ESRC Peer Review College

Conferences

• I have given talks at conferences and research meetings in more than thirty countries.
• 23-27 November: Delivered three talks at the Japan Association of Language Teachers conference, Shizuoka, Japan and participated as a contributor at the University of Birmingham Day at Waseda University, Tokyo
• 8 January 2019: Invited speaker at the one-day workshop on 'Hypothesis Generating in Genetics and Biomedical Text Mining', Lancaster University
• 9-12 March 2019: Presenting a paper with Bethany Gray at AAAL 2019  in Georgia, USA

University roles

• Departmental Director of Postgraduate Research Studies (and admissions tutor).
• 18 February 2019: External examiner for a PhD viva at Lancaster University