We conduct research on academic literacies, as well as on a variety of topics in applied linguistics and TESOL.

We are responsible for co-ordinating UM’s Communication & Academic Skills (CASP) programme. We are currently involved in research that allows us to develop a better understanding of university students’ academic literacies.

CALECS is engaged in various research projects:

• Framework of Competence in English (ForCE) Corpus – the project focusses on building a corpus of English language use, which will support research connected with areas such as SLA, bi/multilingualism, textual analysis and more.
• Designing and running the Spoken English Proficiency Test for Teachers (SEPTT) – the research that is being conducted on SEPTT consists of an investigation into the impact and washback of the test on the ELT industry at large, on school management, on teacher educators, on pre-service teachers, and on teaching and learning. The long-term plan is to analyse speech data collected from each session with a view to comparing teacher discourse used in SEPTT with authentic classroom discourse.
• Corpus of Academic Literacy (CaL) (under construction) – the project will focus on compiling a corpus of writing from various discipline-specific sources to be analysed as well as used as a teaching resource.