Rate My Professor Phil Durrant

Professor Phil Durrant is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Education in the School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Exeter. He earned his PhD from the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham in 2008, an MA in Applied Linguistics with Distinction in 2005 from the same institution, and a BA in Philosophy with First Class Honours from the University of Sussex in 1997. His career includes several years teaching English as a Foreign Language and English for Academic Purposes at universities in Turkey and England, such as Bilkent University Graduate School of Education as Assistant Professor from 2009 to 2011, and pre-sessional EAP at Durham University Language Centre from 2004 to 2008. At the University of Exeter, he began as Lecturer in Language Education in 2011, advanced to Senior Lecturer in 2015, Associate Professor in Language Education in 2020, and Professor in 2023. He holds Higher Education Academy Fellowship since 2013.

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.