David Beauchamp

Both my professional and academic backgrounds are in linguistics and language education. I graduated from the University of Birmingham in 2015 with an MA in Applied Linguistics, which I studied while working overseas as a language teacher, teacher trainer and centre coordinator. My MA dissertation looked at linguistic strategies in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. On returning to the UK, I joined Cambridge Assessment's Research Division and worked on research projects using qualitative and quantitative methods, such as the Aspects of Writing project, and research related to the readability and accessibility of exam questions.

I joined Coventry University as a post-graduate researcher/PhD student in January 2021 to work on the Communicating COVID: Messages from the Downing Street briefings project.. This project is taking a multi-method approach to analysing a multimodal corpus of texts related to official communications during the pandemic. 

Research Interests

My research interests are primarily related to corpus linguistics and discourse analysis of official texts.  Specifically, this includes areas such as linguistic change over time and in response to events, identity in discourse, strategies of persuasion and accessibility of texts.  I am also increasingly interested in social semiotics and statistical analysis of language. My current research aims to unite quantitative and qualitative methods and work across disciplines to bring new insights and perspectives to social, cultural and political language use.