Dr. Siân Alsop is Research Fellow in the Centre for Global Learning, focusing on equity and attainment in HE. As Co-I, she is developing a large corpus for the Story Choices project (funded by the EEF), which aims to understand best practice in early years reading. She is also leading the development of a large corpus of feedback texts to investigate the relationship between written feedback, attainment and ethnicity. Siân was previously a Lecturer in Academic Writing and has worked as Research Assistant 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).

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 I want to contribute to our knowledge of the nature of these disparities, and to find effective ways to address them.