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Dr Esther Asprey

Phone number: 0121 204 4965
Email: e.c.asprey@aston.ac.uk
Room number: MB738

Profile    

I joined the InterLanD (Aston Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Language and Diversity)  team based in The School of Languages and Social Sciences (LSS) in July of 2009 as a Research Associate, having previously held the post of Lecturer in English Language at the University of Birmingham, where my main teaching duties were based in the fields of sociolinguistics and child language acquisition.

Prior to that I was based at the University of Leeds, where I completed a doctoral thesis entitled “Black Country English and Black Country Identity”. During my time at Leeds I held many tutoring posts in the fields of sociolinguistics and dialectology at, among others, the Universities of Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham. I also taught in the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics at Leeds on courses covering child language acquisition, aphasia and historical linguistics.

Qualifications & education     

  • MA Hons (2:1) in English Language and German, University of Edinburgh, 1999
  • MA Hons (distinction) in English Language and World Englishes, University of Leeds, 2001
  • PhD in the School of English, University of Leeds. Thesis title “Black Country English and Black Country Identity”. Successfully completed in 2007.

Employment    

  • January 2009—present: Research Associate on the ESRC funded project “Language, Performance, and Region: Discourse and Sociocultural Identity in the Black Country”
  • July 2009 – December 2009: Research Associate on the Leverhulme Trust funded project “ Language and Place: Birmingham”
  • September 2008 – July 2009: Lecturer in English Language, University of Birmingham
  • July 2007 – September 2008: Research Associate on the LSS funded project “Aston Corpus of West Midlands English”

Teaching activity    

My primary teaching centres on  the related disciplines of sociolinguistics and dialectology. I have also taught widely in the fields of child language acquisition, bilingualism and historical linguistics.
Research interests     My research centres on the Black Country dialect of the English West Midlands, and on the linguistic history of the West Midlands. I am also interested in minority language use in the British Isles, especially the use of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish.

Membership of professional bodies   

  • Member of BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics)
  • Member of LAGB (Linguistics Association of Great Britain)

Selected publications    

Papers:

  • Asprey, E., 2003. “Language and Identity in the Black Country.” In: (eds) Hall, D., T.Markopoulos, A. Salamoura and S. Skoufaki. Proceedings of the University of Cambridge First Postgraduate Conference in Language Research, 26th April 2003. Cambridge: Cambridge Institute of Language Research.
  • Asprey, E., L. Burbano-Elizondo and K. Wallace, 2006. “The Survey of Regional English and its Methodology: Conception, Refinement, and Implementation.” In (eds) Hornero, A. M., J. Luzón and S. Murillo. Corpus Linguistics: Applications for the study of English. Proceedings of the 12th Susanne Hübner Seminar, University of Zaragoza, 19th-21st November 2003. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag.

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