Fiona Copland is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Social Sciences at Aston University, Birmingham where she is Director of  CLERA (Centre for Language Education Research at Aston).  Before working in higher education, she was an English language teacher in Nigeria, Hong Kong, Japan and the UK, where she also taught on a range of teacher education programmes.  This background has influenced her research interests which include talk in pre-service teacher education conferences and teaching English to young learners, and she has published in these areas.  Since attending a course in ethnography, language and communication jointly run by King’s College University of London and the Institute of Education University of London, she has been an active member of the Linguistic Ethnography Forum, co-organising three conferences.   At Aston, Fiona is the Programmes Director of MSc TESOL courses and teaches a range of post-graduate modules.  She also supervises PhD students in the field of TESOL.