Our Research

An inclusive approach to research

CREL members deploy a diverse range of rigorous qualitative, quantitative and creative methods and techniques in their interdisciplinary research. However, all our explorations into the way people communicate, build societies and shape landscapes over space and time is guided by the overarching theme of inclusivity: inclusivity in the academic community we create, inclusivity in how we identify new challenges and inclusivity in the ways we seek to address them.

Our research falls into three broad, cross-cutting themes:

• Language
• Narratives
• Heritage

Language 

This theme focuses on research around language as the gateway to education and social wellbeing, its properties, its development across populations and its teaching. We also study how language interfaces with other areas, including social issues, cognition and artificial intelligence (AI), and efforts to address education, health and wellbeing and reduced inequalities challenges. Current work includes a project on how to encourage language assessment in children and adolescents prior to engagement with justice. We are also working to change the public’s perception on the nature of AI and its potential benefits and dangers for our future society.

Narratives

This theme explores the role of narratives, arts and poetry in changing perceptions about critical issues, such as race, gender, climate, ecology and labour, and how creative writing can be a powerful tool for healing and rehabilitative methods and processes. Recent and ongoing activity includes the development of eco-poetry and eco-narratives, research on narratives about work amongst secondary-school pupils, and an investigation of neoslave narratives, encompassing politics, history and aesthetics.

Heritage

Here, we explore heritage and how it connects with environmental, health and social issues. For instance, we are exploring the role of Punjabi soldiers in the First World War, and how thousands of Punjabi casualties are currently excluded from official records of Britain’s war dead. Another project involves partnerships with local small and medium-sized heritage organisations in Greenwich aiming to improve the visibility of the collections and activities of these sites, as well as to create new pathways for collaborations. An early output from this work is Ottoman Journeys, an exhibition highlighting fascinating connections between Greenwich and the Ottoman empire.

Publications

The Centre for Research in Language and Heritage produces a variety of published outputs, including articles, edited books and policy briefs.

A selection of recent outputs from CREL members (and *secondarily affiliated ILD members), is presented below:

• Arche, María J. , Fábregas, Antonio, Marin, Rafael Marín (2021), On event-denoting deadjectival nominalizations. The Linguistic Review, 38 (2) . pp. 191-231.
• Bowie, L. (2022) The Streets Echoed with Chants: The Urban Experience of Post-War West Berlin. Oxford: Peter Lang.
• Derbyshire, Henry and Hodson, Loveday (2020), Engaging with human rights: truth and reconciliation and hang. In: Sian Adiseshiah, Jacqueline Bolton (eds.), Debbie Tucker Green: Critical Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, (1st) . pp. 89-108.
• *Han, Xuran. 2022. Modulating effects of interactional contexts on bilinguals’ cognitive control: Evidence for the Adaptive Control Hypothesis. International Journal of Bilingualism.
• *Kalocsanyiova, Erika (2020), Researching forced migrants’ trajectories: encounters with multilingualism. In: Christian Wille, Birte Nienaber (eds.), Border Experiences in Europe: Everyday Life - Working Life - Communication - Languages. Nomos, Baden-Baden , 1 (1) (1st) . pp. 217-236.
• King, Andrew (ed.) (2022) Work and the Nineteenth-Century press: living work for living people. Routledge, New York and London.
• *Kukona, Anuenue (2023), Predictive sentence processing at speed: evidence from online mouse cursor tracking. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 47.
• Laval, Cécile and Lowe, Harriet (2020), The use of eye-tracking in experimental approaches in second language acquisition research: the primary effects of Processing Instruction in the acquisition of the French Imperfect. Journal of French Language Studies, 30 (2) . pp. 189-210.
• Martin, Mary Clare. In prep. Social History of children’s illness, 1700-2000.
• Rabourdin, C. (2020) Sense in Translation: Essays on the Bilingual Body. NY: Routledge.
• Rand, Gavin (2022), Decolonising the immortal heritage: Empire, war and history in contemporary Britain. Society for the History War . pp. 1-5).
• Roberts, Leah and Liszka, Sarah Ann (2019), Grammatical aspect and L2 learners’ on-line processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences in English: A self-paced reading study with German, Dutch and French L2 learners. Second Language Research, 37 (4) . pp. 619-647.
• Skovgaard-Olsen, Niels and *Collins, Peter (2021). Indicatives, subjunctives, and the falsity of the antecedent. Cognitive Science, 45.
• Smyth, Cherry and Jordan-Baker, Craig (2022), If the river is hidden.
• Talbot, M. 2021. The Limits of Cosmopolitanism: Ottoman Algiers in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ in Felicia Gottmann (ed.), Commercial Cosmopolitanism? Cross-Cultural Objects, Spaces, and Institutions in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge, 212-230.
• Taylor, Vanessa Jane (2020), Gender and agency in the Anthropocene: energy, women, and the home in Twentieth-Century Britain. RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, 2020/1 (1) (1st) . pp. 11-15.
• *Valentini, Alessandra and Serratrice, Ludovica (2022), Longitudinal predictors of listening comprehension in bilingual primary school-aged children. Language Learning.
• Young, Jennifer (2019), Small Latin, less Greek (but just enough poetry): early modern stationers and the grammar school education. In: The People of Print: printers, stationers, and booksellers 1500-1830, University of Sheffield , pp. 1-10.

Research Projects

COST Action - Justice to Youth Language Needs: human rights undermined by an invisible disadvantage

This COST (European Cooperation in Science & Technology) Action Network with a value of €500k is an international network started in 2023, led by the University of Greenwich. The Action addresses the lack of consistent policies to establish the language abilities that children and adolescents need to possess in order to participate in justice proceedings effectively. The journey through criminal justice is based on highly verbal processes that require a level of verbal ability that is unlikely among young offenders for various reasons. Even where screening for language difficulties exists, no attention is paid to the needs of children from different education backgrounds, with disabilities, who are multilingual, or who are dead or hearing impaired. To ensure protection of human rights of this vulnerable population this Action will assess the situation at European transnational level and propose specific measures to identify language needs.

This project is led by Professor Maria Arche of the Centre for Research in Language and Heritage.