Dr Julie Norton is Director of Postgraduate Research and Research Impact and Knowledge Exchange Lead in the School of Education at the University of Leicester, UK. She is also Chair of the Lesson Study Research Group and teaches on MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL programmes and supervises doctoral research.

Julie is an international expert in the development of learning materials and has extensive experience of leading international research projects in this area, and in teacher education projects. She was Principal Investigator (PI) on the UK-China EMaDA Research and Materials Development Award project, funded by the British Council China (2023-24). Julie has also led research projects with international teams in Turkey, Norway, Spain and the UK.

Julie taught English in France, Japan and the UK in universities, companies and private language schools She is a regular presenter at international conferences on pedagogy. Julie’s doctoral research at the University of Cambridge explored the performance of Japanese candidates in the Cambridge Speaking Tests.

Julie is author of the global coursebook, Navigate B1 (Oxford University Press). She is co-editor and co-author of The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching. Oxon: Routledge (2022).