Dr Chris Tang is a lecturer in international education, language acquisition and applied linguistics. He is also co-founder and coordinator of the Corpus Research in Linguistics and Beyond seminar series. In addition to his academic work, Chris has over 15 years of experience teaching English as a foreign language, completing the Department’s MA in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching in 2009.

Research

Chris's research interests focus on the development and use of applied linguistic methodology and tools in public health communication, risk and disaster communication and language education contexts, particularly those situated in linguistically and culturally diverse environments.

His research experience centres on the development and conducting of projects that combine applied linguistic and social science methods and methodology to improve communication practices. Within a disaster risk reduction and public health domain, he is interested in the role of language, culture, (language) education and community networks as a means of engaging hard to reach groups with low literacy and English as an additional language. Some of Chris's most recent work has focused on applications of corpus linguistics and cognitive semantics in the assessment of health literacy within a project seeking to improve health and disaster risk communication about the dangers of heatwaves and cold spells.

Chris is also involved in two projects looking at the Covid-19 pandemic. You can see a report with recommendations for promoting vaccine uptake amongst UK Bangladeshis here. He is also working on another project around awareness of Covid-19 information in ethnic minority communities.

Teaching 

Chris currently teaches on the following programmes:

• BA English Language and Linguistics
• MA ELT & Applied Linguistic
• MA TESOL
• MA International Education