SURE

After acquiring degrees from Kent and Edinburgh, Michael taught English as a foreign language in Europe and South East Asia. He did a PGCE and worked as a secondary school teacher in the UK and South America. While waiting for a bus in Bogotá, he decided to pursue doctoral research and ended up at the school of English, University of Leeds, where he secured his first academic post. His PhD was not in dialectology, but the great tradition of dialect scholarship at Leeds must have had some effect on him, because after arriving in Sunderland in 2004 he began to develop a keen interest in linguistic variation within the North East, and perceptual dialectology is now one of his main research interests, alongside corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis.