MARG (pronounced ‘marge’, perhaps confusingly!) began in the School of ECLS way back in spring 2007. At that time, the newly-arrived Alan Firth and Chris Jenks (now of University of South Dakota) decided that the School should take more advantage of the growing team of researchers and students interested in language, discourse and social interaction. Along with Paul Seedhouse and Steve Walsh, the team began to meet on a weekly basis, along with PhD students, to jointly analyse pieces of audio/video data of real life spoken interaction.
In the ten years since, MARG has grown in size and stature, now being regularly attended by 15-20 staff and students from the school and other parts of the university. MARG also regularly welcomes visitors from other universities, both in the UK and overseas, and has developed a worldwide reputation for being an exciting forum for the collaborative analysis of social interaction, particularly in settings related to second language learning and use, and typically from the research approach of ethnomethodological conversation analysis. Continue reading About Micro-Analysis Research Group (MARG)
In early September, Rachelle Vessey travelled to Hamburg to present as part of a session on “Hashtag politics” at the 
Paul Seedhouse and Sumita Supakorn have recently had their paper on ‘Topic-as-script and topic-as-action in language assessment and teaching‘ published by 
The article explores the role of language ideologies in news and social media by examining representations of a language controversy in Canada known as “Pastagate”. It can be read in full 
Following on from our profile about recently appointed Lecturer, Dr Chris Leyland, here is some further information about Dr Alina Schartner, who also joined us as Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in early June. Alina kindly answered a few quick questions recently… 
In early June, we were delighted to welcome Dr Chris Leyland and Dr Alina Schartner to the ALC team. Many of us know Chris and Alina from their previous associations with the Section (as students, for example). But for those of you know don’t know them, I asked the latest members of our team a couple of quick questions recently. Here are Chris’ responses… 