Dr Robbie Love

Nominee, Aston University Achievement Award for Best Newcomer

2021

Winner, Aston University College of Business and Social Sciences Staff Award for Best Newcomer

2021

Nominee, Aston Students’ Union Academic Award for Online Learning

2021

Lancaster University

MA

2014

Lancaster University

PhD

2018

Lancaster University

BA

2013

Adverbs on the move: investigating publisher application of corpus research on recent language change to ELT coursebook development

2022

While the role of corpus linguistics (cl) in language teaching and learning continues to evolve, its use in the language teaching industry remains somewhat unclear. The specific ways in which elt publishers use cl research to inform materials development are under-studied, meaning that it is not known whether cl is being used by publishers to its full potential. This study investigates the use of cl research by a major international elt publisher by conducting research into recent change in adverbs in casual spoken British English and sharing the findings with editors from the publisher. Through our analysis, we find evidence of major recent changes in the use of frequent adverbs. Following the corpus analysis, we conducted in-depth interviews with the editors and a review of the materials they subsequently produced using the corpus findings. In so doing, we find some evidence of effective use of corpora in materials development but reveal limitations in current corpus research which prevent editors from employing cl research more effectively.

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Corpora in applied linguistics: Broadening the agenda

2022

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Specifying challenges in transcribing covert recordings: Implications for forensic transcription

2021

Covert audio recordings feature in the criminal justice system in a variety of guises, either on their own or accompanied by video. If legally obtained, such recordings can provide important forensic evidence. However, the quality of these potentially valuable evidential recordings is often very poor and their content indistinct, to the extent that a jury requires an accompanying transcript. At present, in many international jurisdictions, these transcriptions are produced by investigating police officers involved in the case, but transcription is a highly complex, meticulous and onerous task, and police officers are untrained and have a vested interest in the influence of the transcript on a case, which gives rise to potential inaccuracy. This paper reports the design and results of a controlled transcription experiment in which eight linguistically trained professional transcribers produced transcripts for an audio recording of a conversation between five adults in a busy restaurant. In the context of covert recordings, this recording shares many of the typical features of covert forensic recordings, including the presence of multiple speakers, background noise and use of non-specialist recording equipment. We present a detailed qualitative and quantitative comparison of the transcripts, identifying areas of agreement and disagreement in (a) speaker attribution and (b) the representation of the linguistic content. We find that disagreement between the transcriptions is frequent and various in nature; the most common causes are identified as (i) omission of speech that is included in other transcripts, (ii) variation in the representation of turns, (iii) orthographic variation seemingly motivated by phonetic similarity, and (iv) orthographic variation seemingly not motivated by phonetic similarity. We argue that the variable nature of the transcription of ‘challenging’ audio recordings must be considered in forensic contexts and make recommendations for improving practice in the production of forensic transcriptions.

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