PhD Supervisors
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I am interested in supervising classroom-based, preferably intervention, research projects adopting qualitative or mixed methods research methodologies in the areas of educational linguistics (with focus on CLIL, EAL, EMI), formative language assessment and curriculum development. The topics can include, but are not restricted to, evaluation and development of teaching and learning materials and curricula, use of formative assessment in the classrooms, examination of education policy documents and investigation of teacher professional practice.
I am happy to supervise new PhD research projects in the areas of my interest.
I have supervised PhD students on the following topics:
Construction of Islam in the BBC sitcom Citizen Khan
Metrosexuality in Malaysia
Discourses of infertility in blogs, news and clinic websites
Representation of dialect in fiction
Children's books containing same-sex parent families
Language around schizophrenia in the British press
Previous PhDs I have supervised include:
A corpus-based examination of the concept of political correctness in British broadsheet newspapers
The language of marriage rituals in Botswana
Combining corpus approaches and CDA to examine discourses of terrorism in the British and Chinese popular press
Combining corpus approaches and CDA to examine discourses of homophobia in a right-wing political organisation
A corpus study to compare lexical bundle use of Chinese learners of English with native speakers of English
A corpus study of keywords to examine gender identity in British and Malaysian children's writing
The construction of gender identity in Iranian bloggers
A corpus-based comparison of two academic books about Wahhabi Islam
I would be happy to receive applications in any of these areas: first language acquisition (especially formal and functional aspects of syntax), sentence processing, language and Theory of Mind development, cognitive/ usage-based linguistics & construction grammar.
I welcome PhD proposals that are related to my research interests. At present, I am in particular interested in supervising projects on the following topics: 1) Comparison of multiple corpora using statistical techniques and visualisation 2) Phraseology (e.g. collocations) in spoken and written learner corpora 3) Corpus-based sociolinguistics and development of new statistical methods 4) Investigation of different linguistic features in the new Trinity Lancaster Corpus of spoken L2 English
I am interested in supervising PhD projects addressing the topics of corpus linguistics, (critical) discourse studies, multimodality, health communication, or a combination of these.
I am especially interested in supervising PhD students in the area of language testing, second language reading and listening. Topic areas covered by my current and graduated PhD students include: testing listening/reading/speaking/language-in-use, testing integrated skills, language assessment literacy training, rating, and test validation.
I would be happy to supervise PhD projects in bilingual cognition (specially foreign language effects and language context effects on conceptualisation and perception), cross-language interactions in bilinguals, and foreign language learning. I would be happy to receive applications involving cognitive neuroscience methods (specially EEG/ERPs, EDA/GSR, or eye-tracking), or methods employed in experimental psycholinguistics.
I am interested in supervising students in the following areas: Corpus linguistics: particularly the applications to new media (for example, online communication). Science and health communication: particularly media representations of health and illness or complex global issues (such as climate change, AMR), as well as language used in interaction to discuss health issues, particularly those that can be analysed using corpus linguistics and/or discourse analysis.
Pragmatics (particularly involving sociopragmatics, politeness theory, speech act theory, corpus-based pragmatics); History of English (specifically Early Modern English) (particularly involving historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, historical corpus linguistics); Stylistics (particularly involving the stylistics of drama, corpus stylistics); the language of Shakespeare.
I welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students, particularly projects that consider the complexity of language and/or law in safeguarding/child protection/identifying vulnerabilities, projects that use corpus or computational linguistics methods to analyse legal materials, projects about the "sayable and the unsayable" including supra-jurisdictional regulation of cyber-hate (speech) and/or cyber-fake (news), and projects about regulation and control of threatening communications.
I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas and their combinations: vocabulary learning in L1 and L2; L2 spoken production; corpus linguistics; English for academic purposes; English for specific purposes; research using the Trinity Lancaster Corpus of spoken L2 English; using corpora in language learning and teaching, corpus-based approaches to language assessment and testing
When I have capacity I typically supervise PhD students who are using corpus approaches to investigate forensic linguistic questions. I especially welcome projects that have a clear evidential, investigative, or intelligence application.
I am willing to consider PhD applications in areas coherent with my research interests. I am especially eager to supervise students in the following two areas:
- The development of new corpus-based methods, or the extension of existing methodologies;
- The application of these methods in different areas of the humanities and social sciences.
I am also interested to supervise projects that extend established corpus methods to "new" languages - non-European languages and minority languages in particular - especially with regard to topics in descriptive or theoretical grammar.
Please refer to the indicative list of topics studied by my current and previous PhD supervisees available elsewhere in my profile.
I am principally interested in supervising doctoral students in a range of areas related to language assessment (particularly listening or speaking), topics related to English as a Lingua Franca communication, and topics related to interactional or pragmatic competence.
I am keen to receive proposals for research projects in any area combining critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics. Some specific possible project areas are listed at www.hartcda.org.uk.
I would be happy to receive applications in any of these areas: cognitive-typological linguistic theory (especially construction grammar and the usage-based model), language change and the history of English, dialect grammar, as well as the arsenal of research methods used in all these areas of linguistics.
I am interested in supervising students in the following areas: (1) articulatory phonetics / vocal tract imaging / sound change; (2) laboratory phonology / articulatory phonology / task dynamics; (3) computational/mathematical modelling of articulation, sound change, language dynamics, etc; (4) creative approaches to interesting questions in speech research.
I am interested in receiving PhD students in the following areas: psychological aspects of second language (L2) acquisition including L2 speech production and comprehension, cognitive processes of L2 learning, the role of cognitive and affective variables in L2 learning, language learning motivation, self-regulation, learner autonomy, special educational needs in language learning and teaching.
I am interested in supervising students in: forensic speech science (in particular, forensic voice comparison), bilingual phonetics, sociophonetics, laboratory phonology, corpus phonetics, and especially welcome proposals that address issues at the intersection of these areas.
I am interested in supervising doctoral research projects that take a critical perspective on the interrelation of language and political economy. This includes projects that address questions on the commodification of languages and speakers, language, work and mobility (in particular in healthcare), the management of linguistic resources, as well as branding and organisational styling within corporations. In addition, I am interested in supervising doctoral research projects that investigate language ideologies/the politics of language in society as well as research in linguistic landscapes, for instance in education contexts.
I welcome PhD applications in sociophonetics, bilingualism, phonetics, minority languages, north-west Englishes, prosody and minority languages.
Literacy policy, specifically phonics, and how it is implemented in schools The role of written texts in health care contexts (including studies of patients' information searching and learning strategies) Ethnographic studies of literacy practices in various settings (e.g. institutions, workplaces, communities, etc.) Linguistic landscape research: the role of writing and visual in the cultural production of space
I am interested in supervising research studies on all aspects of language testing. My particular areas of research focus are testing language for specific purposes, the scope and definition of language constructs in particular contexts, speaking assessment, language assessment literacy, test users’ perspectives, and test impact.
I am excited by the prospect of working with international students and others in all areas pertaining to digital language learning, digital literacies, and computer-mediated communication.This may include ethnographic studies of highly diverse student populations in digitally mediated environments, case studies of digital/multimodal pedagogies in English as an additional language (EAL) or foreign language (EFL) classrooms, or studies of digitally-mediated task-based learning. Alternatively, prospective postgraduate students may be interested in exploring language learners' out-of-school digital literacies practices, particularly their dis/connections to formal educational contexts. These studies might be conducted in richly resourced contexts (ex. where bandwidth and/or electricity are not issues, and where a range of digital devices are available), or they might be conducted in contexts where necessity is driving innovations in the use of mobile technologies. The same topics could be explored from the perspective of teacher education and development. Equally, I invite proposals from students with interests in multimodality, particularly those working within a social semiotic frame. Again, these proposals may address the needs of language learners,and might connect to any of the following: the the reweighting of meaning across semiotic systems and the increasing need for EAL/ESL/EFL pedagogies to address students' visual literacies; the potential of multimodal practices and/or tasks in language development; and curricular challenges and demands related to such pedagogies. A third area of possible study is research in highly diverse classrooms, and explorations of pedagogies which draw on students' multilingual resources to further their academic success. Such research might attempt to deepen our understanding of the ways in which students' multilingualism could contribute to perspective-taking, abstract reasoning, and/or creativity. Research in this area might also be designed to help us to understand how multilingual learners come to understand themselves as resourced and/or disadvantaged by the relationship between their home language(s), English and (potentially) their additional languages. Finally, I will always welcome proposals froms students who wish to research content-based language teaching in any of its multiple forms (ex. CBLT, CLIL). This may include work with immigrant and/or refugee populations in English dominant countries; studies in EFL contexts where core subjects in primary and/or secondary school are taught in English; research in contexts where English is an official language but where significant numbers speak other home languages; investigations of EAP pedagogies in post-secondary and/or professional contexts; or explorations of content-based designs outside mainstream educational contexts. Research in this area might focus on a specfic group of learners, a disciplinary context, teacher training and development, or policies and practices. Again, I am particularly interested in those adopting a social semiotic/SFL frame as well as those whose specific research questions might address issues of register, or who wish to delve into grammatics.
My research looks at the following six questions, so I am interested in supervising projects on the following:
1. What role do individual differences (e.g., working memory, intelligence, etc.) play in implicit and explicit learning?
2. How does explicit knowledge affect implicit learning?
3. What is the role of frequency in language acquisition?
4. What is the nature of the (implicit) learning mechanism?
5. How do we measure implicit and explicit knowledge?
6. How are implicit and explicit knowledge represented in the mind and, ultimately, the brain?
Metaphor in discourse: study of metaphor in literature, politics, science and health communication; corpus-based approaches to the study of metaphor. Health communication/Medical Humanities: language use in communication about health and illness, including particularly metaphors and narratives. Cognitive stylistics: integration of linguistic analysis with theories of cognition (e.g. Schema theory, Blending theory) in order to study literary texts; the linguistic construction of fictional text worlds; the linguistic construction of minds in fictional and non-fictional narratives. Corpus stylistics: application of corpus methods to the study of literary texts.
(A) Pragmatics: (Im)politeness, Facework, Reciprocity, Speech acts, Pragmatic Markers, Intersubjectivity, Inter-/cross-cultural communication, Corpus Pragmatics, Historical Pragmatics. (B) Dialogic Syntax and/or Conversation Analysis. (C) Cognitive Linguistics: Construction Grammar, Constructional change, Grammaticalization, Semantic Change. D) First Language Acquisition (with a focus on Pragmatic competence, Theory of Mind and Intersubjectivity). (D) Corpus Linguistics: Corpus Design and Corpus-based analysis. (E) Aspect, Tense, Modality and Evidentiality. (F) Chinese Linguistics (all of the above centred on Chinese or comparative approaches to Chinese).
I am interested in supervising doctoral students working in literacy studies, including workplace literacies, academic literacies, audit cultures and accountability, digital literacy practices, literacy practices in religious communities, and adult literacy; linguistic ethnography; communities of practice and situated learning; institutional ethnography; and discourse analysis.
I am particularly interested in supervising students in the areas of online political resistance, critical discourse analysis and language policy, also more broadly in the areas related to my other research interests (see 'Research Interests' on my staff profile). I am currently supervising or co-supervising students working on: Anti-feminist discourse in online forums; Accounts of sexual harassment among sex-workers; Language policy and ideologies in Pakistan; Attitudes towards migrants on Twitter in Saudi Arabia; Persuasion and manipulation in TED talks