The complexity of language is very apparent to anyone involved in the learning and teaching of language. Compared with acquiring one’s mother tongue, learning to use language in our highly literate society is not nearly as automatic, a reality all the more challenging for a child with an impairment. Learning an additional or foreign language presents other challenges, and opportunities. For some children, the existence of a home language has much potential if properly tapped in school.
It’s important to understand why language is perceived as difficult in the UK, given the reality that the majority of people, globally, are multilingual. Progress in language education depends on collaboration between teachers of language and researchers of language, with significant advances coming from teacher-researchers. At heart is the question of what makes for successful language learning? How much does it depend on good teaching? (What is ‘good teaching’?) What other motivational factors are important? Are new technologies being utilized to their fullest?
Education extends beyond the classroom, as well. This ranges from work in the community to support migrants through language to the development of online resources for training interpreters and for supporting the work of translators.
Browse projects from our Showcase events
2025 Showcase
Artificial Intelligence for University Education
Bridging the Achievement Gap: Supporting East Asian Students of French and German on Languages for All Modules
English teacher motivation and possible selves
Finding the Place of West Yorkshire and Glaswegian Vowels in the Chinese Phonological System: Perception of English Accents by Chinese EFL Learners
“Happy to chat, but far from perfect”
How have research-informed word lists been used in second language learning & teaching over the last decade?
How many words are needed to understand spoken communication in English as a Lingua Franca contexts?
The Impact of Learning and Interacting Digitally on EAP Practitioners
Leeds Language Week: Educational Engagement & Advocacy for Languages
Leveraging linguistics to enrich and diversify language teaching and learning
A longitudinal study of learning engagement in UK undergraduate students of Mandarin
The Multilingual Me: Lessons from UK Language Graduates
Negative impact of high status languages in Indonesia (1) Health
Negative impact of high status languages in Indonesia (2) Education
Partner with GenAI: re-imagine assessment and education
Reception Book Buddies: Developing and evaluating a community-based intervention
RefugEAP Case Study
SLA informed language pedagogy
Stepping Up, Standing Out
Strategies to support vocabulary learning in children with English as an additional language (EAL)
Teachers’ Perspectives on the Narrative and Descriptive Writing Difficulties Experienced by Primary School Children
An understanding of what practices and pedagogies have been adopted in digital language teaching and learning post COVID
Understanding Qualitative Studies in Biomedical Science through Corpus
Using semantic density to explore readability of instructions to help parents give medicines to children
What is the impact of learning and interacting digitally on students?
2022 Showcase
The Reading Project
The Place of Linguistic & Cultural Diversity in Teaching
An Online Interactive Game to Teach Spanish Indicative and Subjunctive Modes
Assessment and AI Lead Module Lead
Quantifying bilingualism in children
Materials design in EFL (English as a foreign language)
Student perceptions of subject-specific academic literacy support (insessional)
AI4L: Decolonising Reading Lists
Promoting social justice through dramatizing children’s literature
Training second language (L2) listeners to improve accent comprehension and reduce accent bias
Unveiling the factors for the predictive validity of IELTS for postgraduate studies: assessment, teaching and learning in the TLU domain
Assessing Language Skills at Secondary School
Shifting Focus; Product to Process in EAP Pre-Sessional Programmes. Implications for Teaching, Assessment Tasks, and Rubric.
