International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis
Tuesday to Friday 9am - 5pm | 24th-27th June, 2025
Our History:
Founded in 2000 by Professor Malcolm Coulthard, the International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis addresses topics pertaining to the role, shape, and evidential value of language in legal and forensic contexts.
It was created in response to a growing demand for a course affording an overview of forensic linguistics while also laying solid foundations for a further study of this relatively new branch of applied linguistics.
The Summer School’s first edition took place at Anglia Polytechnic University and was followed by editions in Birmingham and cities around the world, including Barcelona, Kuala Lumpur, Lodz, Mainz, Manila, and Porto.
2025 sees the nineteenth edition, once again held at Aston University.
The city campus is located in the heart of Birmingham, with easy access via rail, road, and air, and has plenty of attractions to discover during the evenings.
The Summer School addresses subjects within the broadly defined discipline of forensic linguistics, including the nature of legal language, forensic authorship analysis, linguistic copyright issues, plagiarism and its detection, and legal translation and interpreting.
We work with authentic language data and use real cases to illustrate theory.
We opt for maximum student involvement, and encourage critical inquiry and debate.
Each year, we invite leading scholars and practitioners in forensic linguistics to be our tutors.
This gives participants the unique opportunity to interact directly with those responsible for recent developments in the field of language and the law and forensic linguistics.
Our tutors have qualifications in linguistics and/or law and some have first-hand experience of providing expert evidence for courts of law.
- Topics
The Summer School addresses subjects within the broadly defined discipline of forensic linguistics. It is concerned with the role, shape, and evidential value of language in legal and forensic settings.
Subjects have included:
- analysis of legal discourse
- structure and semantics of statutes and legal instruments
- legal terminology
- legal translation and interpreting
- speech style in the courtroom
- social organisation of conversation in legal settings
- structure of cross-examination
- socio-pragmatic aspects of interpreting in court
- comprehensibility of legal instruments
- language and disadvantage before the law
- linguistic minorities and linguistic human rights
- forensic text analysis
- forensic speech science
- trade name and domain name disputes.
- 19th Edition Programme
This can be downloaded here.
- 2025 Staff
Dr Madison Hunter, ISSFLA 2025 Course Director
Madison Hunter is a postdoctoral research associate at AIFL. Their main research interests are in the analysis of stance in forensic contexts, most recently exploring the stance-taking patterns of members of white nationalist web fora for the purpose of risk assessment.
Email: m.hunter5@aston.ac.uk
Dr Stefanie Kreibich, AIFL Operations Manager
Dr Stefanie Kreibich is the Operations Manager of AIFL. Her background is in banking and finance, history and language teaching in HE. She gained a PhD with a project about remembrance of former East Germany. For AIFL, Stefanie manages events organization, procurement, HR and financial planning.
Noorin Iqbal, Communications Liaison
Noorin Iqbal is a PhD student at AIFL. Her research focuses on online hate speech against religious minorities in India through a socio-pragmatic lens. She specializes in hate speech research, discourse analysis of linguistic violence, and statistics for linguistics. Previously, Noorin has worked as an English language educator, and public relations copywriter in Qatar.
Dr Krzysztof Kredens, Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
Dr Krzysztof Kredens is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Forensic Linguistics and the Director of AIFL. He has a variety of research outputs in the field and ample casework experience, both as an expert witness and in policing contexts. His main research focus is on individual variation in language use with reference to forensic authorship analysis. He is interested in the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of idiolect but also works on more practical problems around linguistically enabled offender identification.
He also has an interest in interactionally and institutionally engendered communication barriers in the justice system, and in how they can be removed. In particular, he researches aspects of interpreting in police interviews and the courtroom.
Dr Nicci MacLeod, Deputy Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
Dr Nicci MacLeod is a Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics and Deputy Director of AIFL. Her research interests include the language of investigative interviews, language and identity in online settings, disputed meaning in forensic contexts, and the language of gendered violence.
Julija Danu, ISSFLA Tutor
Julija is a doctoral researcher in AIFL. Her research project falls in the area of forensic authorship analysis and seeks to explore correlations between idiolectal features and personality traits, while simultaneously identifying stable idiolectal features across discourse types and exploring potential links between that stability and personality traits. Her other research interests are centred around language variation, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.
Dr Lucia Busso, ISSFLA Tutor
Dr Lucia Busso is a Research Associate in Forensic Linguistics at AIFL and member of the FoLD research centre. She holds a PhD in cognitive linguistics from Pisa University. Her research interests include corpus and experimental methods, especially using quantitative and statistical tools.
Dr Tahmineh Tayebi, ISSFLA Tutor
Dr Tahmineh Tayebi is a Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics at AIFL. Her research is on online offensive and abusive language and other similar phenomena, such as cyberbullying, trolling and hate crime. She investigates these issues by taking a forensic linguistic approach grounded in theories of pragmatics and discourse analysis.
Dr Emily Chiang, ISSFLA Tutor
Dr Emily Chiang is a Research Associate in Forensic Linguistics at AIFL and member of the FTA team. Emily’s research focuses on linguistic expressions of identity in online criminal contexts using pragmatic tools like rhetorical move analysis and speech act theory. Previously she has explored linguistic identity in online child sexual abuse interactions, and how linguistic analysis and understanding can inform undercover police practice in this area. Other research interests include self-styled 'paedophile-hunting' groups, dark web criminal communities, extortion letters and linguistic variation over the lifespan.
Dr Felicity Deamer, ISSFLA Tutor
Dr Felicity Deamer is a Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics at AIFL. Her research focuses on spoken interaction in legal contexts, exploring linguistic issues that emerge at the intersection between law and psychiatry; domains which pursue different purposes using different constructs and methodologies. Felicity’s work explores a range of data including psychiatric reports, police interviews, emergency calls, and bodycam footage from secure mental health wards.
Dr Sarah Atkins, ISSFLA Tutor
Dr Sarah Atkins is a Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics and member of the team developing the Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD). She currently works on a number of collaborative projects, including FoLD, the EXCROW corpus (commercial extortion letters) and 'Crimes in Action' (analysing communication in emergency calls reporting kidnap and extortion). Her work has a strong emphasis on the ways in which linguistic methods and theories can be applied to real-world problems across various settings.
- Course Fees
The fee for the four-day course is £500. The fee for individual days is £140 each. This includes tuition fees, lunch and two refreshment breaks each day, as well as all course materials. Please book via the Aston University shop.
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- What are the entry requirements?
There are none as such. However, in order to fully benefit from the course, participants with no background in linguistics should familiarise themselves with an introductory text such as Aitchison's ‘Linguistics’, Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams' ‘An Introduction to Language’, or Parker and Riley's ‘Linguistics for Non-Linguists’.
- What kind of people come to the school?
Anyone with an interest in forensic linguistics! Among the participants in previous years were civil servants, police officers, translators, a crime fiction author, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and other disciplines. They came from all corners of the world.
- Can I take away credits to use towards my degree at my home institution?
Unfortunately, this is not possible. However, we will be happy to provide the relevant documentation if you plan to get your institution to recognise the School as contributing to your degree programme.
- Is it possible to attend individual days?
Yes, it will be possible to book and attend individual days. There will be a limited number of slots per day for this type of attendance; anyone who tries to book after the maximum is reached will be placed on a waitlist and notified if a slot becomes available.
- What is the cost of participation?
The course costs £500 for all four days and £140 if individual days are booked. There will be two student awards (see below) available which will waive these fees.
- Do I need to bring a laptop?
Yes, you will need it for your homework and in-class practical exercises.
- Are there awards/bursaries/etc. to participate in the School?
There will be two Marton Petykó awards to honour the memory of our prematurely departed colleague. This will be available for students of any level (i.e. Undergraduate, Graduate, or PhD) and will cover the attendance fees for the summer school (note: these awards will NOT cover accommodation or travel expenses). Students will need to submit a CV and a 500-word personal statement detailing why they would like to attend the summer school, including how it will contribute to their career/research development and what their interest in forensic linguistics is. The deadline for applications will be 1 February 2025 by 12pm UK time. They should be submitted in either Word document or PDF form to AIFL Summerschool. Decisions will be made within one month and recipients will be notified by 1 March 2025.
- How do I pay?
Please pay by debit/credit card via the Aston University online store. You can also pay by bank transfer or by invoice – email us for further details.
- Contact
Any Questions?
Contact the course team at AIFL