Dr Mark Brenchley

Dr Mark Brenchley

Senior Research Manager

Mark manages research supporting the development and validation of Cambridge Assessment English products, with a special focus on grammar, vocabulary, and the application of corpus-based methodologies. His areas of interest/expertise include corpus linguistics, tagging/parsing systems, the development of grammatical and lexical knowledge, and the linguistic basis of register development.

Mark holds a PhD in Education from the University of Exeter, where he explored the development of spoken and written syntax within the English education system. Following his PhD, he co-developed the Growth in Grammar Corpus, a novel corpus of student writing that covers the primary and secondary phases of the English education system.

Outside of work, Mark remains first and foremost a Londoner. When not reading or walking, he spends an inordinate amount of time building Lego cars with his 3-year-old.

Key publications and conference presentations

Brenchley, M, Durrant, P and McCallum, L (forthcoming) Understanding development and proficiency in L1 and L2 writing: Quantitative corpus linguistic approaches, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Durrant, P and Brenchley, M (forthcoming) Corpus Research on the Development of Children's Writing in L1 English, in Glaznieks, A, Abel, A, Lyding, V and Nicolas, L (Eds) Proceedings of the 4th Learner Corpus Research Conference.

Brenchley, M, González-Díaz, V and Durrant, P (2018) The noun phrase in children’s narratives: Then and now, paper presented at the 2018 BAAL Linguistics and Knowledge about Language in Education (LKALE) SIG meeting, Birmingham, 2018.

Durrant, P and Brenchley, M (2018) Development of vocabulary sophistication across genres in English children’s writing, Reading and Writing, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9932-8.

Lobina, D and Brenchley, M (2018) Fiat recursio! Inference Magazine 3 (1), available online: https://inference-review.com/article/fiat-recursio.

Brenchley, M (2017) The developmental relationship between spoken and written clause-combining in an English secondary school, paper presented at the 9è Colloque International de Linguistique de Corpus, Paris, 2017.

Brenchley, M (2017) The developmental relationship between spoken and written clause packages in an English secondary school, paper presented at the 9th International Corpus Linguistics Conference, Birmingham, 2017.

Brenchley, M and Cushing, I (2017) Ten things every teacher should know about grammar, Times Educational Supplement 5278, available online: https://www.tes.com/news/tes-magazine/tes-magazine/toyoufromtes-10-things-every-teacher-needs-know-about-grammar.

Brenchley, M and Durrant, P (2017) Growing grammar: Mapping the dimensions, paper presented at the University of Exeter-University College London Grammar in the Classroom Symposium, Exeter, 2017.

Brenchley, M and Durrant, P (2017) When corpus linguistics goes “boink”, paper presented at the Trondheim-University of Exeter Symposium, Exeter, 2017.

Brenchley, M (2016) School-Age grammar: Not whether, but how, paper presented at the Philadelphia Writing Program Administrators Conference, Philadelphia, 2016.

Brenchley, M (2016) The Grammar of school-age writing development: What do we already (think we maybe (don’t)) know?, paper presented at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics, Philadelphia, 2016.

Brenchley, M (2016) The Growth in Grammar Corpus: On working with children, not animals, paper presented at the Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia, 2016.

Lobina, D J and Brenchley, M (2012) Knots, language, and computation: More Bermuda than love, Biolinguistics 6 (2), 176-204.