Impact / Public Engagement

Ben Gibb-Reid Voice 21 Skill share.pdf

Teacher Dialect perceptions

I am running a survey to investigate 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 had a great time as part of a panel of speakers at York's 2023 Festival of Ideas doing a short talk titled The Beauty of Slang. See the video of the event below and here (I'm on at 37 mins). I will also be presenting at the2024 festival with a panel of doctoral students across many fields of linguistics called Mind Your Language.

York Dialect Project 2023-24

As part of Prof Sali Tagliamonte's project Wait What?! I recorded forty-two 16-27 year olds who grew up in York to add to the ongoing York Dialect Corpora. This involved working with Fulford School and making 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 2023 I was hired by the Dept of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York as a course facilitator for their free online course: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics: Accents, Attitudes and Identity. This involved interacting with participants directly in written comments throughout the four-week course.

Voice 21 Sociolinguistic workshops

From September 2022 to December 2023 I have been working 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.