Impact / Public Engagement

Teacher Dialect perceptions

I am investigating the opinions that teachers have about dialect variation in schools. This in partnership with the oracy charity Voice 21 and in collaboration with Dr Claire Childs. Watch this space for more news on this project!

York Festival of Ideas

I regularly take part in the annual York Festival of Ideas, public-facing workshops and events. In 2025, I co-ran a workshop led by Dr. James Cave as part of our YorVoice project, titled: Making (Sound) Waves: Exploring vocal authenticity. 

In 2024, I had a great time as leading a panel of doctoral linguistic students called Mind Your Language - see the video here and below. In 2023 I took part in a panel with a short talk entitled The Beauty of Slang - see the video of this event here (I'm on at 37 mins). 

York Dialect Project 2023-24

As part of Prof Sali Tagliamonte's project Wait What?! I recorded sociolinguistic interviews with forty-two 16-27 year olds who grew up in York, contributing to the ongoing York Dialect Corpora. This involved working with Fulford School and creating a new partnership with York College.

York English Language Toolkit CBD

In 2022 and 2023 I was hired by the Department of Language and Linguistic Science to be a Materials Developer for the York English Language Toolkit. This is a fantastic annual event that takes three or four published articles by linguists and makes them accessible for English Language A-level teachers via short talks and classroom-oriented tasks. My role primarily involved making the tasks but also creating some engaging animation videos covering basic linguistic concepts (see the video on the left for one on isoglosses).  

Future Learn Sociolinguistics course

In 2025 I convened free public-facing online Future Learn course: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics: Accents, Attitudes and Identity. Previously, I have helped facilitate this. It's an entirely free online programme offering an introduction to sociolinguistics featuring cutting edge York research, please do sign up if you're interested.

Voice 21 Sociolinguistic workshops

From September 2022 to December 2023 I worked with the oracy education charity Voice 21 to create workshops and resources for schools on dialect variation as part of a WRoCAH-funded research employability project. This has involved running a company-wide 'skillshare' presentation and going into schools with staff to run a bespoke 'Introduction to Sociolinguistics' workshop. 

• Skill share slides - Linguistic diversity: valuing every voice's variation [PDF]