Rate My Professor Phil Durrant

Durrant's research utilizes applied corpus linguistics to explore language learning, the roles of language in education, student writing development from school to university, vocabulary acquisition and sophistication, formulaic language, and disciplinary variation in academic language. Notable monographs include Understanding Development and Proficiency in Writing: Quantitative Corpus Linguistic Approaches (2021, Cambridge University Press, with M. Brenchley and L. McCallum), Research Methods in Vocabulary Studies (2022, John Benjamins, with A. Siyanova-Chanturia, B. Kremmel, and S. Sonbul), Corpus Linguistics for Writing Development (2023, Routledge), and Shaping Writing Grades: Collocation and Writing Context Effects (2022, University Press, with L. McCallum). Highly influential publications feature 'To what extent do native and non-native writers make use of collocations?' (2009, IRAL, 673 citations), 'Adult learners’ retention of collocations from exposure' (2010, Second Language Research, 419 citations), and 'A function-first approach to identifying formulaic language in academic writing' (2011, English for Specific Purposes, 228 citations). As Principal Investigator, he leads ESRC-funded projects Writing Tasks at School and University (£923,838, 2025-2029) and Growth in Grammar (£397,304, 2015-2018), alongside co-investigator roles in Research Council of Norway's MULTIWRITE (2021-2025, ≈£1.1m) and others. Awards include the Horowitz Prize for the best article in English for Specific Purposes (2009). He co-chairs the Centre for Research in Language and Literacies, leading its Vocabulary Studies strand, serves as Treasurer of the BAAL Vocabulary Studies Special Interest Group, and sits on editorial boards for Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Applied Corpus Linguistics, and International Journal of Learner Corpus Research.