Education

Education

Although I am less involved in education than I have been at earlier points in my career, I continue to enjoy supervising MA dissertations at King's College, London, contributing to research journal peer reviews, and being a member of conference scientific panels.

Professional experience

I was a Lecturer in the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King's College, London University from 1999 to 2020.  I continue to work in the department as a visiting lecturer and supervise MA dissertations in Academic Purposes, Written Discourse Analysis and other aspects of applied linguistics.  I have also taught in higher education in France and China, and in primary, secondary, and adult education in the UK.  In addition, I have worked in many countries in Central Europe and Asia as a consultant and trainer in the design, management and evaluation of projects in academic settings, providing consultancy services for governmental and non-governmental organisations. 

Research

I have long-standing research and teaching interests in the areas of written communication and the application of corpus linguistics in language education and discourse analysis. 

Selected recent publications

Granger, S. and C.Tribble,  1998. Exploiting Learner Corpus Data in the Classroom: form-focused instruction and data-driven learning. In Granger, S. (ed.) Learner Language on Computer (pp. 199-209), Harlow: Longman.  
Scott, M. & C.Tribble,  2006.  Textual Patterns: Key words and corpus analysis in language education, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.  
Thompson, P. & C.Tribble, 2001. Looking at citations: using corpora in English for Academic Purposes,  Language Learning and Technology. 5 (3) pp. 91-105
Tribble, C. & G.Jones,  1990.   Concordances in the Classroom, Harlow: Longman.  
Tribble, C. & U. Wingate, 2013. From text to corpus – A genre-based approach to academic literacy instruction,  System. 41/1, Issue 2: 307–321
Tribble, C. (ed.).   2012.   Managing change in ELT: lessons from experience, London: British Council.  
Tribble, C.  2010. A genre-based approach to developing materials for writing.  In Harwood, N. (ed) English Language Teaching Materials: Theory & Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  
Tribble, C.  2010. The game I'm interested in…,  International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 15/3: 359-362
Tribble, C.  2011. Revisiting apprentice texts: using lexical bundles to investigate expert and apprentice performances in academic writing in Meunier F. De Cock S. Gilquin G. and Paquot M. (eds) A Taste for Corpora. In honour of Sylviane Granger (pps. 85-108), Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  
Tribble, C.  2013. Concordancing in C.A. Chapelle (ed) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.  
Tribble, C.  2013. Corpora in the language teaching classroom in C.A. Chapelle (ed), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.  
Wingate, U. & C. Tribble, 2012. The Best of Both Worlds? Towards an EAP/Academic Literacies Writing Pedagogy,  Studies in Higher Education. 37/4 :491-495
Tribble, C. (2015). Teaching and language corpora: Perspectives from a personal journey in Leńko-Szymańska, A. & Boulton A. (eds.) Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven learning : 37-62, Amsterdam:  Benjamins.
Tribble, C. 2015. Writing academic English further along the road. What is happening now in EAP writing instruction?  English Language Teaching Journal. 69/4: 442-462
Tribble, C. 2017. ELFA vs. Genre: A new paradigm war in EAP writing instruction?  Journal of English for Academic Purposes,  25: 30-44

PhD Thesis - Writing Difficult Texts

If you have an interest in corpus linguistics and the ethnography of writing, you may be interested in downloading my PhD thesis (Lancaster University).  The abstract from the thesis is given below.

ABSTRACT
This thesis uses concepts and techniques associated with genre analysis, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to offer some solutions to problems in writing instruction - in particular the problem of learning to write into a new or unfamiliar genre.  Two major corpus linguistic analytic frameworks are used in elaborating these solutions. The first is the multivariate / multifunctional approach proposed in Biber D, 1988; the second draws on the notion of keywords developed by Scott M, 1996.  These frameworks are used in a detailed analysis of a research corpus of an example genre - fourteen Project Proposals (112,000 words) submitted in bids to win contracts issued by European aid and development agencies,.
The thesis has four major sections.  In the first, an interpretation of  "writing", "difficult" and "texts" is provided as a way of framing the later discussion.  This is followed by a survey of current issues in teaching writing, and an introduction to the Project Proposal corpus (including comments on technical problems of corpus construction).  In the second section,  An account of the texts, a detailed analysis of the texts in the Proposals Corpus is presented in three chapters: Grammar and Style, Lexical Dimensions, and Organisation.  This analysis is preceded by a summary of some of the problems which face researchers attempting to replicate Biber 1988.  In a small innovation for this kind of corpus study, the single chapter in the third section: Talking with writers goes beyond a strictly corpus approach, and reports case-studies and interviews with writers from the organisations which originally provided the research data.  This has proved to be a particularly valuable initiative as it demonstrates the importance of not only depending on corpus evidence in developing an understanding of a genre.
The final section of the thesis: Implications for pedagogy reviews a set of issues and questions which were raised in Chapter 2.  During this chapter, these questions are used as a way of offering a set of practical proposals for integrating genre analysis and corpus linguistic techniques into writing pedagogy.

You can download a PDF version of this thesis here: Writing Difficult Texts

Additional Resources

I've been asked to provide copies of some of my earlier publications in Computer Assisted Language Learning.  As I have time I'll add more to this set.  The titles below are now available to download:

Top