Dr Paul Thompson PhD

• PhD in Applied Linguistics, Reading
• MA in TEFL, Reading
• PGCE, York
• BA in English & Related Literature, York

I took up the post of Director of the Centre for Corpus Research at Birmingham in September 2009, after working for thirteen years as a lecturer in EAP/Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading. I had taught in Kenya (one year) and Japan (fourteen years) before moving to Reading in 1996 to do doctoral research.

I convene the MA module, 'Corpus Assisted Language Learning'.

Paul Thompson is interested in supervising postgraduate research students in the areas of:

corpus linguistics
applications of corpus-based approaches to language description, particularly in education
applications of IT in language teaching

Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

With Susan Hunston, I was Principal Investigator on an ESRC project (ES/K007300/1) on 'Investigating interdisciplinary research discourse: the case of Global Environmental Change', August 2013 to November 2015.

With Alison Sealey and Mike Scott, I worked on an ESRC project (R000223900), 'An investigation into corpus-based learning about language in the primary school', June 2002 to May 2004.

With Hilary Nesi, a lecture and seminar recording project, the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, funded by a Resource Enhancement grant from the Arts and Humanities Board (RE/AN6806/APN13545), April 2002 to March 2005.

With Hilary Nesi, Sheena Gardner and Paul Wickens, an ESRC funded project, "An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British Higher Education" (RES-000-23-0800), December 2004 to November 2007. The major output of this project was the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus.

My research interests are in academic and other specialised discourses, in the linguistic aspects of human-computer interaction, in uses of educational technologies in language learning, and in the exploitation of corpus resources and methodologies in learning about language.

External roles

• Co-editor and founder of Applied Corpus Linguistics journal (2020-)
• Co-Editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2009-2018)
• Member, ESRC Peer Review College
• Applied Linguistics Pathway Co-ordinator for Midlands Graduate School (MGS)

University roles

• Deputy Director, College of Arts and Law Graduate School with responsibility for distance learning and student progression