We are proposing a programme of knowledge exchange activities following on from our current ESRC-funded project 'Developing Media Literacy: Towards a Model of Learning Progression' (RES 062-23-1292), which will be completed in December 2011. We are proposing to work with some of the teachers and developers of educational materials who have been involved in the current project, in order to generate a set of outcomes that will maximise the impact of the research on educational practice. These outcomes will focus specifically on the primary school age range, and will include: - teaching materials for use in classrooms - professional development resources for teachers - curriculum plans that will facilitate the development of media literacy education in schools. The work will be centrally informed by the key findings of the research in relation to learning progression, and will build on existing materials developed in the course of the current project, which will be revised and developed in light of further piloting in the schools. The outcomes will be published online by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and the English and Media Centre (the project partners), and disseminated through a series of professional development activities, conference workshops and articles in professional and academic journals.

The project exploits an existing dataset, The British National Corpus (BNC), for the study of informal spoken British English as used by different age and social groups across the UK. In addition, new developments in British English will be investigated by comparing the BNC with BNC2014, a new dataset that is being developed at Lancaster University in collaboration with Cambridge University Press. This allows us, for the first time, to look at language change in spoken British English, on a large scale, over twenty years. By combing methodologies from the fields of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics as well as using novel analytical methods for in-depth exploration of the data, the project will offer new insights into social variation in British English that have previously not been possible. The focus of the sociolinguistic analyses will be on age, an important aspect of everyday social life, that has so far received only limited attention from researchers studying language. The main contribution of the project is not only to our knowledge of British English but also to enabling future systematic research in this area. The results of the project will be applied in teaching of the English language at secondary schools (AS and A-level) and in ESL/EFL classes to students whose mother tongue is not English. Internationally, there is a growing demand for EFL/ESL teaching, which also represents an important part of British economy. The results of the project will also be disseminated via a free online course (our Corpus Linguistics MOOC) run by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University as well as via different channels of the project partners (project ambassadors). The project has been endorsed by Cambridge University Press, a leading global academic publisher and part of the University of Cambridge, the English and Media Centre, an important educational charity working with secondary teachers of English Language and Media Studies in the UK and abroad and Trinity College London, a major international testing board operating in over 40 countries worldwide.