Dr Emma Marsden is a senior lecturer in second language education at the University of York. Her career began as a French and Spanish teacher and Head of Spanish in a secondary school in England. She has also taught English in universities and schools in Chile, Spain and France. For the last 15 years her research has focused on the learning and teaching of grammar and vocabulary. Emma led the creation of IRIS, the large repository of materials used to carry out research - please see http://www.iris-database.org. She has also run projects and held advisory roles to try to improve and understand links between research, practice and policy.