Profile

I work in language and speech learning. I’m particularly interested in learning how we learn to hear and say the difference between sounds we don’t have in our own languages, but also in how we learn the different parts of a foreign language that might be different from our own, like the order we put the words in. I’m also doing work on finding out what kind of things help adults and children in learning languages, and whether they find different things helpful.  This means I normally go into primary schools and have the pupils there play language games to see how they learn, which is lots of fun!

Most of my day will involve sitting at my desk trying to organise various things related to teaching and research, such as thinking about experiments I can run, doing analyses on data that I’ve collected, or trying to write up what things I’ve found. If I’m still collecting the data I might be in a primary school getting pupils to play language games. I also spend a lot of time teaching students about how children learn and develop, how we can do statistical analysis, or how to learn to write assignments at university, so I might be standing at the front of a big classroom trying to explain things to my students as well!