My research straddles multiple disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, and advertising. In order to develop my knowledge and skills when faced with measuring advertising, I know that it is important to engage in specialist training that enables me to observe and measure the effectiveness of advertising not only from an academic but also practitioner point of view. I therefore signed up to study The Eff Test Certificate.

During my Master’s studies in English Language at the University of Birmingham, I discovered the UoB Sign Language Society; a society that organised 65 hours of tutored lessons in level 1 British Sign Language (BSL) over a course of night classes for 6 months. Sign Language and gesture has become a keen field of research for academic linguists. At the taster session, the sign language linguist Dr Adam Schembri from my department (English Language and Applied Linguistics) introduced the concept of deaf 

The full-day workshop was managed by Professor Jeannette Littlemore and Dr Paula Perez-Sobrino as part of their Marie Curie project, Exploring Multimodal Metaphor in Advertising,  and brought together academics and business people interested in language in advertising.  Being particularly fascinated by this area of research, I signed up to attend the workshop.  

​There was a host of insight into this applied area of linguistics that was especially intriguing; from learning about the impact of logo design to watching psychophysiological technology that tracked skin (sweat) responses of participants to audio-visual viral advertising! 

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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