The Centre for Linguistics, Language Education and Acquisition Research (CLLEAR) promotes a broad-based linguistics and applied language research and consultancy agenda.
The Centre for Linguistics, Language Education and Acquisition Research brings together research-active staff, language educators and postgraduate students with an interest in formal and applied linguistics. The Centre provides a lively and active research environment, and promotes excellence in teaching and learning. It hosts a wide range of events, including workshops, student-led reading groups, other reading groups, research seminars, and conferences.
Our staff and PhD students have research expertise in a variety of topics, including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, multilingualism, linguistic ethnography, linguistic theory, language acquisition, testing and assessment, and language education.
The group on language learning and teaching investigates a range of research questions in diverse settings. A unifying feature of these research endeavours is to find out how humans learn second and additional languages in and outside of classrooms, how teaching practices vary and might be improved, what features are typical or interesting about the language produced by learners, and how culture and other beliefs influence teaching and learning practice.
The linguistic theory group is interested in theories of the human language faculty and how language is instantiated in the minds of speakers. The group’s theoretical interests largely concern current generative approaches to the language faculty and its architecture, with a focus on syntax and its interfaces with morphology, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. A specific focus of this group are the language attrition processes that happen in the mind when our first language is not used on a regular basis, or when it gets in contact with another dominant language.
Our director
The director of CLLEAR is Dr Adriana Patino.