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Research projects

2011-13 OPTIMALE Optimising professional translator training in a multilingual Europe

OPTIMALE is an Erasmus academic network funded by the Directorate-General for Education and Culture. OPTIMALE aims to act as a vehicle and stimulus for innovation and high quality in the training of professional translators.

Professor Christina Schaeffner is a member of the OPTIMALE Steering Committee.

2009-13 West Midlands English: Speech and Society

The objective of this ESRC funded research is to increase understanding of the relationship between use of dialect and sociocultural identity. To this end, it looks at discourse practices in the wider West Mifdlands region.

The project looks at the relationship between traditional dialect forms which are typical of the West Midlands, and the ways in which performers in the region use these forms. It examines the possibility that language can be used to construct a certain identity, doing so by reference to the notion of indexicality; this being the idea that language features can mean different things to different people in the community.

This research is led by Dr Urszula Clark of the English Studies group.

2010-12 The politics of ‘transformative’ culture in popular arts and education

Dr Sarah Amsler of the Sociology, Public Policy and Management group has been awarded £5k from the British Academy to conduct this research between August 2010 and February 2012.

2010-12 Opposition to nuclear power plants in France

Director of French Studies in the School of Languages and Social Sciences, Dr Graeme Hayes, has been awarded a Marie Curie fellowship to investigate opposition to nuclear power plant commissioning in France now and in the 1970s and 80s. The project starts in September 2010 and will run for two years.

2010-11 Investigating Global Practices in Teaching English to Young Learners

The overall purpose of this project is to explore how English is taught to young learners in classrooms around the world. The main aims of the project are to: 

  • Discover what policy/syllabus documents inform TEYL practices around the world
  • Investigate and map the major pedagogies that teachers use
  • Better understand teachers’ perceptions of their roles and responsibilities, including the challenges they face
  • Identify how local solutions to pedagogical issues can be effective and how these may resonate globally.

For more information contact the Research Team: Dr Sue Garton,Dr Fiona Copland,Professor Anne Burns

2009-12 GeWiss (Spoken Academic Discourse)

This project was awarded funding of €550,800 from 2009-2012 by the Volkswagen Foundation. The partner institutions are the Herder Institut in Leipzig (Germany), the University of Wroclaw (Poland), and Aston University (UK). The project aims to analyse and compare spoken academic discourse in English, German, and Polish, based on an extensive corpus of audio and video recordings and transcriptions of oral examinations, student presentations, and research papers presented by specialists in their fields. One of the expected outcomes will be to provide learners of all three languages with support for speaking, responding, and functioning appropriately in the respective academic discourse settings, for example by instructing learners about different approaches to questions in oral examinations etc. 

For more information, please contact one of the Principal Investigators at Aston: Mr Ramesh Krishnamurthy (English) or Professor Gertrud Reershemius (German).

2009-10 Language and Place: Birmingham

Birmingham has a rich social, cultural and linguistic history.  Numerous texts have been written in the local dialect to reflect this - both for performance art and individual reading. This project aims to address the lack of linguistic research on the varieties of English associated with Birmingham.

The research is led by Dr Urszula Clark under a Research Fellowship grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

2009-10 Nouveaux développements du système verbal français

This project funded with €15,000 by the Délégation générale à la langue françaises et aux langues de France includes transcriptions of oral materials on the one hand from the media, including news, sports (Tour de France, World Cup, Roland-Garros), history programmes, chat shows, scientific programmes; and on the other hand from interviews with native speakers of French. For more details contact Dr Emmanuelle Labeau.

2008-09 Valorisation et exploitation des corpus oraux

This €5,000 grant from the Délégation générale à la langue françaises et aux langues de France allowed Dr Emmanuelle Labeau to format and make available oral corpora of L2 French. It included data collected during Dr Labeau's Leverhulme project 'Tense and Aspect Development in L2 French' during 2006-2007 (Anglophone L2 speakers of French), and Inès Saddour's PhD corpus (Tunisian Arabic L2 speakers of French).

2008-09 Cycles of Grammaticalization  

Aston University and Birmingham City University are delighted to announce the following series of one-day seminars on Cycles of Grammaticalization, funded under the International Network programme by The Leverhulme Trust. 

For further information please contact Dr Pierre Larrivée.