I am The Carnegie 125th Anniversary Fellow and an Associate Professor of Languages and Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Communication in the University of Birmingham (UK). I also hold a UKRI Metascience AI Fellowship. My research addresses issues in applied linguistics, with specific interest in artificial intelligence, corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis, and language pedagogy.

I am is PI on the “Developing disciplinarily situated recommendations for responsible GenAI use in the Social Sciences” project – GenAI in the Disciplines, in short. Funded by UKRI Metascience, this project takes a critical perspective on AI use across the social sciences with a view to developing discipline-specific guidelines for evaluating the use of AI in the research process. The project focuses on a number of areas in the Social Sciences, including Business and Economics, Education, and Linguistics, and takes a bottom-up and participatory approach, bringing together different disciplinary voices to shape the future of AI use (or non-use) in the social sciences.

In the context of climate change, my work has addressed issues in science communication and public-oriented research communication, across languages, disciplines, and contexts, and has shed light on the culturally and epistemologically situated nature of science. Through this activity, I have established, among other things, the registral features of forms of public-oriented research communication, identified cultural differences in the representation of climate science in English, French, and Spanish, and highlighted interdiscursive tendencies of science communication to reflect linguistic characteristics of news media. 

My work in language pedagogy centres on issues of AI, data-driven learning, English-medium instruction, writing pedagogies, materials development, and assessment development, all typically (though not exclusively) through a corpus linguistics lens. Through this work, I have set research agenda for the field, interrogated the use of AI in language education, focusing on issues of personalisation and AI literacy, and advanced participatory approaches to materials and assessment development, through collaborative work with teachers, publishers, and assessment and governmental bodies

I am Co-Editor of the Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics and Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides book series, Section Editor of the Elsevier International Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, and Associate Editor of the journal, Language Learning and Technology. I am also a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Royal Society for Arts, Fellow of the Global China Academy, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Géras International Correspondent.

To find out more about Niall’s work, click here.