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Research at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, UK

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2012

Hugo Santiago Sanchez
Hugo Santiago Sanchez*
Affiliation:
Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, Hugo.Sanchez@warwick.ac.uk
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Extract

Established in 1983, the Centre for Applied Linguistics (CAL) at the University of Warwick is committed to a wide range of teaching, research and consultancy activities which focus on language use, language analysis, language learning and language teaching. It is also engaged in the development of multimedia, teaching and research materials and in a number of joint projects with national and international institutions. Its activities are supported by a variety of resources: staff and student expertise, facilities, equipment and materials including collections such as the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) and the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and the Warwick ELT Archive.

Information

Type
Research in Progress
Information
Language Teaching , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 399 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Established in 1983, the Centre for Applied Linguistics (CAL) at the University of Warwick is committed to a wide range of teaching, research and consultancy activities which focus on language use, language analysis, language learning and language teaching. It is also engaged in the development of multimedia, teaching and research materials and in a number of joint projects with national and international institutions. Its activities are supported by a variety of resources: staff and student expertise, facilities, equipment and materials including collections such as the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) and the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and the Warwick ELT Archive.

Research at CAL is devoted to the study of language-related issues in relation to professional practice. It clusters around three main fields of specialist expertise: English language learning, teaching and assessment (ELLTA); professional and academic discourse (PAD); and working and communicating across cultures (WACC).

ELLTA members pursue a multidisciplinary approach and investigate language learning, teaching and assessment processes embedded in particular contexts of practice. Their current areas of interest include appropriate pedagogy, teacher education and development, motivation, learner autonomy, language assessment, English for young learners, and materials evaluation and design.

PAD members examine text and discourse in a range of professional and academic social contexts through a variety of approaches to analysis such as computerised corpus-based analysis, genre analysis and conversation analysis. The scope of their linguistic research also extends to language teaching, as some projects involve, for instance, the analysis of texts produced for different contexts of language teaching and learning, and the investigation of classroom teacher and learner talk.

WACC members support interdisciplinary research and a multidisciplinary perspective on the study of issues associated with working and communicating across cultures. Their research interests concern comparisons of language use in different cultures and languages; the impact of cultural factors on communicative interaction in a variety of social, educational and professional contexts; intercultural effectiveness; issues related to culture, identity and adaptation; and cultural conceptions of teaching approaches and pedagogical practices.

Three individual doctoral projects in progress, representing different stages in the research process, have been selected to illustrate some of the applied linguistic research carried out at CAL. The first is an action research project in its early stages which falls within the ELLTA strand and aims to study the integration of content and language through materials development in the context of secondary school education in Argentina. The second project lies within the PAD strand and pedagogic research, and looks at the texts produced in Botswana by social workers and social work undergraduates in their professional and educational contexts, respectively. The last project is relevant to teacher education and involves an autoethnographic exploration of the career of a teacher trainer and principal in Sri Lanka.