The language of school and university
The ability to use language effectively is central to educational success at all levels. My research into academic language aims to inform both language teachers and teachers of other disciplines by answering questions like:
- What are the key linguistic characteristics of successful academic writing? How is it different from other registers?
- How does language use typically vary across educational levels and academic disciplines? How can we model this diversity in ways that can help students navigate the demands of school and university?
- What happens when children learn to write in multiple languages?
- What distinguishes higher from lower quality writing?
Since 2025, I have been leading the ESRC-funded Writing Tasks at School and University project, which aims to understand the range of writing tasks used in secondary schools and universities in England and to model the linguistic demands of those tasks.
Since 2021, I have been collaborating with colleagues from the Universities of Oslo, Bergen, and Agder on the MULTIWRITE project, to study how school children in Norway develop their writing across first, second and third languages.
Between 2015 and 2018, I led the ESRC-funded Growth in Grammar project – a corpus study of how the syntax, vocabulary and phraseology of English children’s writing develops from age six to sixteen. See here for a list of relevant work. For more information about the Growth in Grammar corpus, see here. If you would like to access the corpus, please complete the user agreement form.
Collocation
Collocations are pairs of words which seem to be ‘attracted’ to each other in one way or another. Examples include: true feelings; shrug your shoulders; face the consequences; curry favour; black coffee. The idea of collocation has fascinated me since my first encounter with it as a student on a TESOL training course, partly because it is such an obviously useful and important part of learning a foreign language; partly because analysing collocations can bring to light new layers of meaning in texts; and partly because I’m intrigued by how native speakers’ linguistic systems are able to find just the right collocation to fit the context.
Because of this early interest, I did my PhD on the topic of collocations in second language learning. Since then, I’ve published a number of studies on how collocations are learned, used and mentally processed. See here for a list of relevant work.
Corpus linguistic methods
Since my first encounter with corpus linguistics, I have been fascinated by its potential for answering applied linguistic questions. The relationship between the data we can derive from a corpus and the applied questions we want to answer is rarely a straightforward one, however. This has led to an ongoing interest in corpus linguistics as a methodology and in what we can and cannot infer from corpus research. See here for a list of publications related to corpus linguistics as a methodology.
Phil Durrant 