Welcome ...

... to my homepage. I am a PhD student in the department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. I work within the field of applied linguistics - the identification, investigation, and (hopefully) the solution of language-related real life problems. My current research projects focus on psycholinguistics, second language acquistion, language teaching and bio-medical health linguistics. I have also recently been involved in the investigation of 20th century changes in the English language.

These research projects are brought together by an interest in the psychology of language and the practical application of corpus-based approaches. Corpora are large, representative, structured bodies of text, elecectronically stored and processed. These provide new and interesting insights into language, which are often beyond the reach of intution and traditional analsysis. In particular, I am interested in the combination of corpus-based methodologies and psycholinguistic experimentation.

I have been closely involved in the creation of and currently direct the research activities of The Centre for Biomedical and Health Linguistics - a non-profit organization dedicated to facilitating communications in biomedical and health education, research, clinical care, policy-making and policy implementation. I also currently co-oordinate the Corpus Research Group at Lancaster University together with Costas Gabrielatos. I teach on the following linguistics undergraduate courses: Language Acquisition and Language Origins and Corpus-based English Language Studies.