Professor of TESOL and Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK

Fiona Copland is the Principal Investigator of the English as a School Subject project. She Professor of TESOL in the Faculty of Social Sciences, where she is also Associate Dean of Research. Fiona started her TESOL career in Nigeria, where she stayed for two years working in a secondary school as a volunteer with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas).

After taking a PGCE at the University of Manchester, she then spent two years in Hong Kong in a secondary school in the New Territories (as part of a British Council scheme) before moving to Japan, where she spent five years working for the British Council in Iidabashi. During this time, Fiona team-taught in Junior High Schools, taught adults English and became Director of CELTA programmes. On returning to the UK, Fiona took an MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham and spent a number of years as a director of CELTA and DELTA programmes in Birmingham.

She received her PhD in 2008, also from the University of Birmingham. She has worked in the Universities of Birmingham, Birmingham City and Aston, where she directed various MA and MSc programmes in TESOL and teacher education. She has a range of research interests within TESOL. She has published widely on teacher feedback conferences in pre-service teacher education and has written a book on this topic with Dr Helen Donaghue for Routledge, which should be available early in 2021. She is also very interested in teaching English to young learners and edited the Routledge Handbook of Teaching English to Young Learners (2018) with Dr Sue Garton.

Fiona has also published on materials for ELT, native speakerism, classroom languages, and the experiences of international students. More broadly, she has been very involved with the Linguistic Ethnography Forum, a special interest group of BAAL, and has published two books which focus on linguistic ethnographic methodologies: Linguistic ethnography: collecting, analysing and presenting data (with Professor Angela Creese) and Linguistic ethnography: interdisciplinary explorations (with Dr. Julia Snell and Dr. Sara Shaw).