I taught EAP for approximately three years from 2018 to 2021, initially at the British Council in Japan, and then at the University of Leeds. I co-led the summer Language for Law pre-sessional course in 2020 and 2021 at the University of Leeds, and I have presented in the areas of EALP course design and listening.
Prior to teaching I practised as a criminal Barrister in London, representing defendants in the Magistrates' Courts, the Crown Court, and the Court of Appeal. I also prosecuted for the CPS in the Magistrates' Courts. I am currently doing an MA in Language and Linguistics, with the focus being on Forensic Corpus Linguistics. As part of my MA, I have applied corpus methods to statutory interpretation, criminal trial discourse, and authorship attribution.
I have worked in different roles at the University of Edinburgh for some years now, currently as Head of English Language for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. English for Law is a field in which I have longstanding experience and a continuing interest. Within EALP I was responsible for the instigation and development of one of the first English for the LLM pre-sessionals in the UK HE sector. I have worked with law students, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, legal translators, interpreters and teachers of Legal English both in Edinburgh and internationally in Zimbabwe, Lebanon, Lithuania, Romania and, most recently, the Czech Republic. When time and circumstances have been favourable I have presented and published in the field. Children, grandchildren and a plot of land in the Dumfriesshire hills keep me busy.
Since 2002 I’ve taught English in a few places: Spain, Ukraine, Lebanon, and England and then EAP at University of Glasgow from 2010. A Glaswegian, I graduated in Law at Strathclyde University and was then in legal practice for 4 years, followed by two years working for a well-known legal publisher. From 2005 to 2009 worked extensively with the Beirut Bar Association, Lebanon teaching English for lawyers. I’ve maintained my interest in law by volunteering at the Citizens' Advice Bureau from 2010 to 2013 and then from 2019 as a case worker for UCU. When I’m not doing UCU case work, I’ll be working in various EAP contexts including legal writing and reading courses for Masters’ students.
Having worked in HE here and abroad for most of my life, I formally discovered EAP for Law after joining Queen Mary University of London in 2017. I've taught and helped develop the Law Pathway for our Pre-sessional programme and the 'Critical Thinking and Writing for Law' programme for our postgrads. This accompanies their main programme at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies in London and Paris. I also teach research writing and intercultural communication skills, my own research focusing on images of the 'other'. Facing the challenges of AI, I act as my school's academic misconduct officer and a deputy chair of the university's Academic Misconduct Panel.
I am a lecturer in English for Academic Purposes at the University of Leeds where I have designed and ran in-sessional and pre-sessional support for 'international' students since 2016. I have published and presented on issues around teaching EALP. I am currently interested in how to deepen my own understanding of how complexity and criticality are represented in legal academic writing and how to best teach this to students.
I am a lecturer in English for Academic Purposes at Leicester University, where I am Director of the Insessional Programme. One of my roles for the last decade has been to support second language students in the Law School, during which time my interest in English for Academic Legal purposes (EALP) has grown. I recently completed my doctoral thesis, which is an interdisciplinary study of the vocabulary that LLM International Law students need for reading. It is a corpus linguistic analysis, based on my own 2-million word, 21-genre DSVC-IL corpus, which covers 12 domains of private and public law. I currently have a number of publications in progress. I am also interested in ESAP and vocabulary more generally, and am an advocate of data-driven learning. I am a Senior Fellow of BALEAP and of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), and I am a member of BAAL and ALT (the Association of Law Teachers). I regularly present at Corpus Linguistics, EAP and Legal Education conferences in the UK and abroad.