Linguists from the University of Warwick have teamed up with England Boxing and UK Coaching in a bid to interpret and improve the way in which coaches communicate in high-pressure situations.

Warwick dialect expert Esther Asprey of the Centre for Applied Linguistics will be celebrating the voices of the Black Country in a new episode of the BBC Radio 4 series, “Tongue and Talk: the Dialect Poets.” In conversation with presenter and poet Emma Purshouse, Dr Asprey discusses the origins of the dialect and talks about what it means to write in dialect, how we represent sound through spelling choices, and the pressure poets can feel on a national level to use Standard English.

The voices and experiences of civic leaders in Africa are the focus of a new book co-edited by the University of Warwick’s Professor Helen Spencer-Oatey. Drawing on case studies and survey data, Developing Global Leaders: Insights from African Case Studies explores the personal experiences of a diverse group of civic leaders from 31 countries across Africa, and shares their insights on transforming leadership in an age of rapid change.

Linguistics experts from the University of Warwick met with some of the UK’s top coach developers for a one-day workshop aimed at exploring language use in high-performance sports coaching and discussing ways to apply the latest research to real-life coaching situations.

Academics, practitioners and activists meeting at the University of Warwick call for language teaching and learning to be seen as essential in today’s global society and urge policymakers to adopt a national and international strategy to break the monolingual mindset which can limit access to social and economic opportunity and wellbeing.