Advisory board
Our project aims to track language in London in real time, continuing major earlier projects, but also to integrate this knowledge into primary and secondary school learning support and curricula, as well as with multiple audiences via the British Library.
Collaboration with key stakeholders on both the practice and academic side is integral to the project. Our advisory board will ensure sustained and informed engagement with our main beneficiary groups.
Practitioner members
Cathy Burns
Cathy Burns is a primary teacher and a SENCo of many years experience. She has worked across London for the past 40 years as a class teacher, senior manager and (for 18 years) as a primary SENCo. She currently does interim SENCo work supporting schools who are in the process of recruiting or where the current SENCo need additional support.
Dan Clayton
Dan Clayton is an education consultant at the English and Media Centre in London, specialising in English Language A level. He has been a teacher of A level English for over 25 years, senior examiner and moderator for different awarding bodies and is author/editor of many books for A Level English Language, including for OUP, CUP and Routledge. Dan has worked closely with many universities to help develop links between A level and HE, worked as a research fellow at UCL, is part of the Lexis podcast team and runs the EngLangBlog site and @EngLangBlog Twitter account.
Jonnie Robinson
Jonnie Robinson is Lead Curator of Spoken English at the British Library and responsible for the Library’s extensive archive of sound recordings of British accents and dialects. As a dialectologist, Jonnie has worked extensively with audio data deriving from two nationwide surveys of regional speech, the Survey of English Dialects and BBC Voices and in 2010 co-curated the world’s first major exhibition on the English Language, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices.
Academic members
Jenny Cheshire
Jenny Cheshire is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. She researches language variation and change, especially in British dialects, and co-directed the team that first documented and described Multicultural London English. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistic Society of America.
Sue Fox
Susan Fox is Associate Researcher (retired Senior Lecturer) in Linguistics at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research interests include language variation and change; dialect and language contact and the impact of immigration on language change. She has worked extensively on Multicultural London English, and is author of The New Cockney.
Ian Cushing
Ian Cushing is Senior Lecturer in Critical Applied Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work focuses on linguistic in/justice in schools, paying particular attention to the intersections of language, race, and class. He works closely with teachers in designing anti-racist approaches to language education.
Julia Snell
Julia Snell is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Leeds. Her research explores the role of language in education, focusing on inequalities of class and race. She has published on children’s language variation; language and social class; language ideologies and the policing of non-standardised speech; classroom discourse and dialogic pedagogy; and teacher professional development. She is convenor of the Linguistic Ethnography Forum, a special interest group of the British Association for Applied Linguistics.