Recent and upcoming day courses

If you would like to attend any of these events, please contact us.


: : 16 June 2008
Working with an Interpreter

A natural consequence of the recent wave of immigration into Britain is a significant increase in the number of non-English-speaking witnesses and suspects interviewed by police forces throughout the country. Responding to this trend, the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University will hold a one-day workshop on 'Working with an interpreter', an event meant to sensitise police officers to the complex issues involved in public service interpreting and offer advice on how to manage interpreter-mediated interaction. On the one hand then, the workshop will aim at raising awareness of the role of public service interpreters and the nature of their work, thus enabling the participants to define their expectations for situations where non-English-speaking parties are involved. On the other hand, it will provide relevant practical training, making use of role-playing activities and real-life case studies. Please contact us for more details or to book a place.


: : December 2008
Forensic text analysis

This one day course will examine the techniques and findings of authorship analysis and through worked examples introduce students to the potential and limitations of the approaches used.

In examining an evidential text a forensic linguistic tests legal claims made of that text. Forensic authorship analysis, for example, becomes necessary when the courts need to determine who wrote documents such as terrorist plans, ransom demands, libellous statements, offensive text messages or malicious e-mails. Such cases may involve comparison with texts of known authorship or the examination of a single text to produce a sociolinguistic profile of the writer. Other than authorship, other claims may be made about the origin of a text’s : Was it produced as a record of a conversation? Was it produced at a single sitting or has it been edited? Is it a multi-authored document or based on or copied from a different document? All these questions can be of forensic interest in specific cases and can be addressed through linguistic analysis. This one day course introduces the student to practical techniques of all forms of forensic text analysis and allows and through practical exercises and demonstrations encourages a discussion of the theoretical issues such analyses raise.


: : February 2009
The Linguistic Courtroom

This one-day course will examine all aspects of courtroom interaction from a linguistic perspective. With students we will look at the nature of different question types in examination and cross-examination and the role barristers in building witness narratives through questioning. We will also examine witness responses from different types of witnesses, special measures used to protect vulnerable witnesses and possible techniques used by witnesses to avoid answering questions. Finally we will examine judge jury interactions and how judges instructions and summing up are understood by jurors. The course will be interactive examining real courtroom interactions and will provide students the opportunity to reflect on their own practice where this is relevant.