Dr. Siân Alsop is Research Fellow in the Centre for Global Learning, focusing on equity and attainment. She uses corpus linguistic approaches to understand issues of language and literacy in and beyond academic contexts.

As Coventry Lead on the Teacher Choices project, she is currently developing a large corpus of children's storybooks to inform development of a new measure of vocabulary acquisition (funded by the Education Endowment Foundation). The project aims to understand the impact on learning of everyday pedagogical practice and to provide evidence that can be readily applied by classroom teachers. On the Access to Attainment project, she helped to develop a new measure for understanding difference in HE student outcomes (funded by the Society for Research into HE). Using corpus linguistic techniques, she led language analysis on the Independent Diversity Review of the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards (commissioned by CILIP), and also co-led a national survey on Library practice on the project Maximising the Diversity of Public Collections (commissioned by Libraries Connected). She is currently leading the development of a large corpus of feedback texts to investigate the relationship between written feedback and attainment.

Siân was previously a Lecturer in Academic Writing and has worked on a number of projects relating to academic discourse and attainment disparity across disciplines, including the development of the British Academic Written English (BAWE). She was awarded a PhD by Coventry University in 2016 for her work on the pragmatic annotation of the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC).

Siân has significant experience of teaching in HE. She has supervised three PhD theses to completion and is currently supervising 12 PhD theses (10 as Director of Studies), including joint studentships with Deakin University, in areas of feedback and assessment, academic language, attainment disparity and EDI in HE, and intersections between AI and student learning. She currently leads the Centre's core PhD Reviewing Literature module, and was Functional Lead for postgraduate taught provision across Global Learning. Over the past fourteen years, she has successfully designed and delivered undergraduate and postgraduate across levels and disciplines of academic writing, linguistics, and education. 

education, attainment, equity, corpus linguistics, academic writing, language of lectures, data visualisation, computational methods

As a sector, we know that not all students have equal opportunity to succeed in their academic careers, which poses a problem for our students, for academic institutions, and for wider society. I work with large bodies of language data to understand attainment disparities among different groups of students. Through my research and classroom practice I want to contribute to our knowledge of the nature of these disparities, and to find effective ways to address them.