Dr Laurence Romain

Profile

Biography

Before joining the Department of Education at York on a Bowland Fellowship I was a research associate with the Out Of Our Minds team at the University of Birmingham. As part of that role, I worked on a variety of projects and collaborated with psychologists and computer scientists to design studies that combined corpus data and usage-based approaches to language and second/foreign language acquisition with computational simulations of learning based on learning theory. 

I received my PhD from the Université de Lille (France) where I worked on argument structure constructions in the framework of construction grammar(s) with Prof. Maarten Lemmens. 

I was first introduced to cognitive linguistics and usage-based approaches to language while doing my master in Toulouse and continued in this branch of research for my PhD. I started working in Second/Foreign Language Acquisition as a researcher with the Out Of Our Minds team and I am now combining these approaches and methods in my own research project as a Bowland Fellow. 

Career

While working as a research associate at the University of Birmingham, I also taught an undergraduate course in Corpus Linguistics. 

While studying for my PhD I taught a variety of undergraduate modules at the Université de Lille (introduction to linguistics, semantics and morphology, advanced grammar). 

I also have experience teaching English as a foreign language at university level (Université de Lille, Université de Lyon Lumière). 

Research

Overview

My current project as a Bowland Fellow focuses on the acquisition of potentially alternating linguistic structures (argument structure constructions in this case) by second/foreign language speakers of English. I want to explore at what level of granularity native speakers generalise when using these structures and apply these findings to teaching. I plan on using both L1 and L2 corpus data to examine potential differences between the two varieties. I will also use a simple learning algorithm to identify which elements in the structure and its context are the most reliable cues in the choice between the structures. This project combines insights from cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, and learning theory.

The aim of this research is to design new ways of teaching linguistic structures to learners by giving them the building blocks that will enable them to generalise and progress in their language learning journey. 

External activities

Memberships

I am an affiliated member of the Out Of Our Minds research group at the University of Birmingham with whom I collaborate on a number of projects in second/foreign language acquisition.