Professor Phil Durrant

My research answers applied questions about language learning and the roles of language in education. I have particular interests in the ways that language is used at school and university and the challenges and learning opportunities that academic language presents to students.

After completing an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, I spent several years teaching English as a Foreign language and English for Academic Purposes at universities in Turkey and England, where I helped students who did not speak English as their first language prepare for study in English-medium universities.

Rooted in this experience, the central motivation of my research is to inform the teaching of academic language at school and university. I have particular interests in answering questions like:

• How does students’ written language change as they progress through their education?
• What linguistic features distinguish more from less successful student writing?
• How does the language that students need vary across different academic disciplines?
• How do the different languages that a student knows interact as their academic language develops?

I have researched these questions through projects supported by the ESRC (2015-18) and the Research Council of Norway (2021-5), amongst others. My work has drawn centrally on the methods of applied corpus linguistics and I have recently published two monographs exploring how such methods can help us understand language development (2021, 2023). I also have a long-standing interest in the use and development of vocabulary in first and other languages. I am treasurer of the BAAL Vocabulary SIG and have recently published a monograph on research methods for vocabulary studies (2022).