Sian Alsop
Siân uses corpus linguistic approaches to investigate issues of equity and attainment in various educational contexts. She likes working with large spoken and written corpora and has a growing interest in data visualisation and writing analytics techniques. She is currently working on two projects that investigate attainment disparities between students from different backgrounds: 1. developing a large corpus of written feedback with Sheena Gardner and Cathy Malone (Sheffield Hallam University), and 2. mapping curricula characteristics onto student outcomes with colleagues from Oxford Brookes University. She is also continuing work on expanding the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC). Siân has previously worked with Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner on the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus.
Patrick Corness
Patrick contributes to Jim Clarke and Benet Vincent’s Clockwork Orange translation corpus project. Having created the relevant parallel corpora, he is presently investigating Polish and Slovak versions of Anthony Burgess’s novel and has presented the first results of the Polish project at a conference at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and published the paper, A Clockwork Orange in Polish: Robert Stiller’s Dystopias, in Volume 2 of the Proceedings: Słowiańska Wieża Babel, tom 2 Język i tożsamość [Language and Identity]. Poznań, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM (Adam Mickiewicz University Press), 215-225. For the Slovak investigation, the parallel corpus has been established with alignment at paragraph level and at unit-of-translation (generally sentence) level. The creation of a parallel concordance of Nadsat lexis as a resource for analysis of its treatment in the Slovak translation is presently in progress, based on this corpus. At the invitation of a specialist academic publisher, Patrick has prepared and submitted a draft scholarly edition of the classic Ukrainian drama The Song of the Forest by Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913). It includes a new annotated translation (presented in parallel with the original Ukrainian text) and a concordance of key features of the original work and their treatment in five earlier English translations. The concordance was extracted from a parallel corpus created to facilitate corpus-based comparative analysis of the five respective translations. In connection with this work, a mobility grant was received under the British Council Ukraine Culture Bridges programme to facilitate a conference presentation and study visit to Ukraine in 2018. Other relevant activities include long-standing association with the Institute of the Czech National Corpus in Prague and Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, involving joint research, corpus building and publishing of Czech/English and Czech/Lithuanian comparative lexicographical studies.
Sheena Gardner
Sheena Gardner is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Coventry University. Her research integrates functional, ethnographic, corpus and genre-based approaches to investigate the nature and use of academic English in educational contexts. She enjoys supervising PhD students and working with visiting scholars in areas, such as second language writing and English for Academic Purposes, that are related to the English registers and genres encountered and used in Higher Education by home and international students. She is co-author of Genres across the Disciplines: Student writing in higher education with Hilary Nesi (Cambridge, 2012), and co-editor of Multilingualism, Discourse and Ethnography with Marilyn Martin-Jones (Routledge, 2012) and Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age with Siân Alsop (Equinox, 2016).
James Henry
James is currently studying for his PhD at The University of Birmingham. His research focuses on academic writing for Business, and how writing in the EAP context compares to disciplinary discourse. He is interested in how corpus linguistics can be used to inform other areas of applied linguistics and discourse analysis; such as genre analysis or systemic functional linguistics. James has presented at national conferences on these themes.
Hilary Nesi
Hilary is Professor in English Language at Coventry University. Her research activities mostly concern corpus development and analysis, the discourse of English for academic purposes, and the design and use of dictionaries and reference tools for academic contexts. She was principal investigator for the projects to create the BASE corpus of British Academic Spoken English the BAWE corpus of British Academic Written English, and the Writing for a Purpose project to produce academic writing materials for the British Council ‘Learn English’ website. She is the co-author of Genres across the Disciplines: Student writing in higher education (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and she is leading the development of the Coventry / Macmillan Dictionaries FutureLearn MOOC “All you ever wanted to know about dictionaries but were afraid to ask”.
Simon Smith
Simon's research focuses on the use of corpora, especially data-driven learning (DDL), in the teaching of Chinese and academic English. His current project, which he will be working on at the Centre for Global Learning: Education and Attainment (GLEA) and is the subject of a planned EPSRC bid, involves the porting of Chinese to an online language instruction platform, SkELL (Sketch Engine for Language Learning). A substantial part of this task will be to develop an adaptive segmenter for Chinese, which will allow Chinese text to be tokenized (divided up into words) in a way that it’s thought will benefit learners more than currently available tools.
Benet Vincent
Benet’s research interests relate to applications of corpus linguistics in a number of areas, including the investigation of modality and evaluative language. Another area of interest is the application of corpora in language teaching and learning and DDL – see the BAWE Quicklinks project. He is also involved in the Clockwork Orange translation corpus project with Jim Clarke and Patrick Corness (Coventry University) and the Corpus of Health Science Research Article Introductions project. He is co-guest editor of the Special Issue of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics on Decision-Making in Selecting, Compiling, Analysing and Reporting on the Use of Corpora in Applied Linguistics Research.