Students have their academic work published in the first volume of 'Trent Notes on Linguistics'

The journal aims to highlight excellent student work to external partners and academics.

The title image from 'Trent Notes on Linguistics'

The first volume of Nottingham Trent University’s (NTU) journal ‘Trent Notes on Linguistics’ has been launched online by the Linguistics department. Edited by lecturers Dr Natalie Braber, Dr Laura Coffey-Glover and Dr David Wright, the journal has received submissions from both undergraduate and postgraduate students, with all work being externally peer-reviewed before publishing.

The journal aims to showcase the excellent academic work produced by students at NTU, which would otherwise stay within the University. The work featured in the journal has been produced as part of assessments or dissertations. In the editors’ introduction, the team explain: “It is our belief that too often, the high-quality scholarship submissions produced by students go unrecognised beyond the remit of first and second markers, and therefore we have created this platform to allow for a broader audience”.

Articles in the journal cover a range of subjects that reflect the various disciplines within linguistics. BA (Hons) English and Linguistics graduate Roxie Ablett writes about the sexist gendered discourses of Twitter users during ‘Storm Doris’, while PhD student Tara Coltman-Patel discusses how identities are created in political discourse, focusing on Barack Obama’s speeches. Book reviews are also included in the journal; in this case Lydia English reviews ‘Musicophilia’ by Oliver Sacks.

The journal aims to reflect the variety of research specialisms at NTU, such as sociolinguistics, child language acquisition, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, forensic linguistics, clinical linguistics and language, gender and sexuality.

This issue of ‘Trent Notes on Linguistics’ has featured five different students. However, students have also been involved in the project as Assistant Editors, Copyeditors and Proofreaders.

The Linguistics team hope that this journal will inspire students to develop their employability skills through working as a team on a professional project, as well as improving their academic work. They go on to say: “The goal of this journal, beyond publishing high-quality student work, is to develop the research capabilities and ambitions of students, publishing experience, teamwork and confidence in liaising with academics”.

You can read ‘Trent Notes on Linguistics’ here: https://journals.ntu.ac.uk/index.php/tnfl/index