The Arabic Linguistics Group meets regularly to discuss articles on aspects of Arabic linguistics or to listen to a presentation by a member of the group. It is convened by Imran Alrashdan and Lucy Johnson. It was previously convened by Mohamed Krer (2010-11) and Kholoud Althubaiti (2008-10).

• E-mail: Imran Alrashdan, isaalr (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)
• E-mail: Lucy Johnson, ljohnsb (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)
• Arabic linguistic resources

The Arabic Sociolinguistics Research Group meets every two weeks to discuss articles in sociolinguistics and dialect variation. Members of the group have the opportunity to give a talk or an oral presentation of what they are up to in their fieldwork.

• E-mail: Kairia Al-Qahtani, kaalqa (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)
• Arabic linguistic resources

The CALL Research Group is co-ordinated by Dr. Adela Gánem-Gutiérrez. It will be of interest to any students currently carrying out or intending to carry out research focused on any aspect of CALL.

The main aim of the group is to provide a forum in which staff members and students working on CALL research have the opportunity to exchange ideas about current research issues and obtain feedback on their work.

Meeting activities include:

1. Discussion of relevant texts and research articles led by members of the group.
2. Presentations given by group members on their research, including work in progress.
3. Practice of conference presentations in order to receive feedback from the group.
4. Any other activities suggested by the group members and which can forward our research interests, goals, and objectives.

We aim to meet twice a month during term time.

• Computer Assisted Language Learning Research Group website
• E-mail: Dr Adela Gánem-Gutiérrez, aganem (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

This research group brings together members of our Department and research students who are working on a variety of topics in computational linguistics and constraint-based approaches to linguistics. The group is co-ordinated by Dr Doug Arnold and meets on a regular basis throughout the academic year.

• Constraint-Based Linguistics (CL) Group
• E-mail: Dr Doug Arnold, doug (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

The Conversation Analysis (CA) Research Group is co-ordinated by Dr. Rebecca Clift and meets weekly during term-time. It is a forum for the technical, conversation-analytic examination of interactional data, and discussion of current research in conversation analysis. Our members are current PhD students and they bring a number of native languages to the group. Currently we have speakers of Arabic, Japanese and English, and past members have been native speakers of Greek and French. We also invite leading CA researchers to lead data sessions and present work-in-progress; past visitors have included Paul Drew, John Rae, Celia Kitzinger and Ray Wilkinson.

• E-mail: Dr Rebecca Clift, rclift (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

The English Language Teaching (ELT) Research Group is co-ordinated by Dr. Julian Good. This will be of interest to any students currently carrying out or intending to carry out classroom based research focussed on English Language Teaching, primarily with a qualitative approach. The meetings are not lectures or talks. Students bring along samples of current research or projected research for discussion by the group, so student input and participation is paramount.

• E-mail: Dr Julian Good, jrpgoo (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

The English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Research Group is co-ordinated by Dr Nigel Harwood and Dr Bojana Petrić. It will be of interest to any students currently carrying out or intending to carry out research focused on English for specific or academic purposes, taking a qualitative or a mixed-methods approach.

There are three main formats for meetings:

1. Students may present their work for about 20-30 minutes, and then the group provides comments or questions. For instance, students may present draft research questions for feedback, or may present some of their findings. Students who are in the earlier or later stages of their research are encouraged to present: it's never too early to make a presentation!
2. Students or staff may practise a conference presentation, with the group providing feedback.
3. The group may read an agreed article in advance, and meet to discuss it. During the last couple of years, articles on the coding of interview data and on the content of literature reviews have been discussed.

• E-mail: Dr Nigel Harwood, nharwood (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)
• E-mail: Dr Bojana Petrić, bpetric (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

Language analysis for determination of origin (LADO) is a new branch of applied linguistics, used by governments in processing asylum seekers who are applying for refugee status. Applicants are interviewed by government agencies seeking to ascertain whether they speak the language of a group they say they belong to, as part of testing their claim to come from a certain nation, region or group.

The primary mission of the Language and Asylum Research Group (LARG) is to stimulate research, contribute to the further development of guidelines, and promote best-practice for practitioners working in the field of LADO, through exchange of informed views.

The group is convened by Professor Peter L. Patrick and Dr Diana Eades.

• Language and Asylum Research Group website
• E-mail: larg (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

Because of the growing availability of large amounts of natural language data in electronic format, computational methods are playing an increasing role in linguistic research. Simultaneously, natural language engineering (NLE) techniques are becoming more widespread in areas such as data mining and web search. As the problems tackled in the scientific study of language and by developers of NLE applications are often the same, interaction between researchers using computational methods to study language and those interested in NLE applications is beneficial to both. The University of Essex has a long tradition of research in the area of language and computation (which has a variety of names, including computational linguistics and natural language processing), starting with work on machine translation and parsing in the 1980s, as well as work on formal semantics.

The Language and Computation group is an interdisciplinary group created to foster such interaction between researchers within the University, and includes staff and students from the Department of Languages and Linguistics, the Data Archive and the Language, Logic and Information group in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering.

• Language and Computation Group website

The Language Learning Discussion Group has arisen out of the Cognitive Linguistics Discussion Group which was formed in 2006, following and initiative by one of our PhD students in the Department of Language and Linguistics.

In our informal group meetings, we discuss selected readings and have presentations given by group members on their work. Readings are typically concerned with research into language learning from an applied linguistics/pedagogical perspective and/or a usage-based/cognitive linguistics perspective and/or a sociocultural perspective. Our main focus is on recent empirical studies of second language learning. Presentations include reports on work in progress on which the presenter would like feedback from the group (e.g. plans for a PhD project, data collection instruments to be tried out, results from a pilot or main study) and practice runs of conference presentations.

• Language Learning Discussion Group website
• E-mail: Dr Karen Roehr-Brackin, kroehr (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

This research group brings together members of our Department and research students who are working on a variety of topics in Lexical Functional Grammar (and especially its application to Arabic). The group is co-ordinated by Professor Louisa Sadler and meets on a regular basis throughout the academic year.

• E-mail: Professor Louisa Sadler, louisa (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

This group brings together students and members of the department to discuss questions broadly related to the structure of words and their relation to other aspects of language structure and function. Typical issues include inflectional and derivational morphology, argument structure representations, compounding, the relation between word structure and syntax/semantics. Lexical structure in a wide variety of languages is discussed. The group is co-ordinated by Professor Andrew Spencer and meets on a regular basis throughout the academic year.

• E-mail: Professor Andrew Spencer, spena (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

The L2 phonology research group is primarily interested in the interaction of phonological theory and second language acquisition. We are interested in understanding all aspects of phonology and how it relates to a better understanding of the language faculty as a whole. We are unlimited in coverage with respect to 'sound' related issues and look at topics in theoretical and descriptive phonology, first and second language phonology, the relation between phonology and phonetics, the interface between phonology and syntax and issues in phonological processing.

• E-mail: Dr Nancy Kula, nckula (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

The Phonology Research Group is interested in the investigation of all aspects of phonology and how it relates to a better understanding of the language faculty. We are interested in theoretical and descriptive phonology, first and second language phonology, sociophonology, the relation between phonology and phonetics, the interface between phonology, and syntax and issues in phonological processing, among other topics.

The group is co-ordinated by Dr Wyn Johnson and meets on a regular basis throughout the academic year.

• E-mail: Dr Wyn Johnson, wyn (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

The Psycholinguistics Research Group at Essex investigates grammatical processing in adult native speakers and language learners, child language acquisition, as well as neurolinguistic topics including developmental and acquired language disorders.

• Psycholinguistics Research Group website
• E-mail: Dr Sonja Eisenbeiss, seisen (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

The Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Research Group provides a forum in which staff members and doctoral students working on SLA from a generative perspective have the opportunity to exchange ideas about current research issues and obtain feedback on their own work. We achieve this through critical discussion of recent published and unpublished research papers, and through members of the group giving regular conference-type presentations of results from their own ongoing studies. We also aim to pursue collaborative research projects on topics related to generative SLA.

• E-mail: Professor Roger Hawkins, roghawk (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)

The Syntax Research Group comprises members of staff who share a general interest in syntax. The group meets on a semi-regular basis during term time to discuss major theoretical works in syntax, as well as draft research papers written by individual members of the group.

• E-mail: Dr Doug Arnold, doug (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk)