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Language is central to education. To succeed at school and university, students need to make sense of, and express themselves through, an academic register that differs in fundamental ways from that of everyday conversation and popular media. Gaining fluency in this register is both one of the key aims of education and, for many, one of the key obstacles to success.

In this talk, I will discuss how applied linguistic research can help address these issues. In particular, I will argue that large-scale, systematic analysis of language use across different educational levels, academic disciplines, and task types can both inform pedagogical practice and provide important insights into the nature of education and of mature language development. I will illustrate this with findings from my recent work and discuss how I would like to see corpus linguistic research into the development of academic language progress in the future.

About the speaker

Professor Phillip Durrant is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Education in the University of Exeter.

Seminar recording

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