From 17th to 21st July, I volunteered and participated part-time at the Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2017, managed by Dr Florent Perek, at the University of Birmingham.  As part of my role, I assisted at the group events, answering questions and keeping full-time participants up to speed with the instructions from the presenters.  Interestingly, in my spare time, I was able to attend some of the sessions from the guest speakers throughout the week.  

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Despite what the title suggests, I thought attending and presenting at an international conference would be far from Sim-ple.  Having spent many hours on my PowerPoint presentation, rehearsing the slides and the potential questions, as well as fundraising for the trip in advance, I had put in a lot time and effort in preparation for this event.  However, preparation for conferences, and indeed any kind of speaking in front of an audience, is 

​1. Introduction
Likes and reactions on Facebook can operate as extending narrative evaluation, its practices online, while communicating multiple different meanings (Page, Harper, & Frobenius, 2013; West & Trester, 2013; West, 2015).  However, there has been limited research that investigates the use of likes and reactions as potential politeness strategies in this online environment (cf. Tian et al., 2017).  Therefore, in this report I analyse the meanings attributed to likes and reactions by Facebook users and how they are actually employed when responding to 

I graduated on Thursday 6th July 2017 with first class honours in English Language from the University of Birmingham.  Coming to university and moving to a big city such as Birmingham was a life-changing experience, and it proved to be a very different lifestyle from the one I had known from my childhood in the South West of England, in the Forest of Dean.  With the vast amounts of people and wealth of knowledge I experienced at university, I met with so many different and stimulating ideas, which developed my understanding of the English language and other languages besides, as well as making many friends.  Being admittedly quite intense at times with a lot of challenges thrown in, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at university during my Bachelor's degree.