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LDC Newsletter - King's College London · PDF fileWelcome to the 4th LDC Newsletter. As...
Transcript of LDC Newsletter - King's College London · PDF fileWelcome to the 4th LDC Newsletter. As...
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 1
LDC Newsletter
Centre for Language Discourse & Communication Issue 4 April 2012
Editorial
Welcome to the 4th
LDC Newsletter. As assiduous readers may
note, we’re no longer quite as ‘annual’ as we used to be (the last
edition was 2009), but this delay certainly isn’t due to any lack
of productivity. There is some evidence of this in the 2011 QS
World University Rankings for Linguistics, where King’s now
appears in the world top 50 (7th in the UK), and of course the
pages that follow fill this out much more vividly.
Instead, a good deal of our time has been taken up with
institutional reorganisation, particularly in the area of research
training. Up until 2010, the Centre for Language Discourse &
Communication was one of over 600 centres and departments
recognised by the UK Economic & Social Research Council, but
the ESRC then decided it needed to concentrate its resources,
and at the end of some intense competitive bidding, the King’s
Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre
(KISS-DTC) emerged, one of just 21 DTCs funded by the
ESRC.
There are several ways in which LDC has played rather a
significant part in this development. Most obviously, we now
contribute to three interdisciplinary training themes (Language,
Media & Culture; Education & Lifelong Learning; Health
Practices & Understandings) and from 2012-13, there will be a
substantial language and discourse element in the advanced
methods training offered to doctoral social scientists right across
the College. In addition, I have taken on the role of KISS-DTC
Director. But more than that, the KISS-DTC represents a major
endorsement of LDC’s goals and mode of operation. Backed
first by the College’s Strategic Investment Fund, and then by
Arts & Sciences, by the Schools of Social Science & Public
Policy and Arts & Humanities, and by the Department of
Education & Professional Studies, LDC seeks to be a focal point
for the shared specialist expertise of researchers distributed
across several different units, and now with the KISS-DTC, this
logic has been rolled out much more widely, so that instead of
just connecting linguists dispersed across two or three Schools
like LDC, there is now a strategy and resources for linking a
much larger social science diaspora spread across at least seven
of the nine Schools at King’s.
In this newsletter, there is only a small flavour of LDC’s activity
– you can find a view that’s much fuller and more up-to-date on
our webpages (www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc). Still, it gives a sense of the
less formal side of what we do, and I’d like to thank Annalisa
Fagan, Emily Heavey and all the contributors for the enterprise
and energy they have put into our current issue, number 4.
Ben Rampton, Director, Centre for LDC
Table of Contents
Editorial 1
Feature: Celia Roberts 2
People
Staff 3
Visiting researchers 6
PhD students 7
Feature: Gerlinde Mautner 8
Events and meetings 9
Funded projects 10
Collaborations 10
And finally... 11
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 2
Feature
Interview with Celia Roberts
Celia Roberts is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the
Department of Education & Professional Studies. Her research
is concerned with language and ethnicity. She uses two
qualitative methodologies, interactional sociolinguistics and
ethnography, to look at disadvantages faced by linguistic and
ethnic minorities in interaction with institutions. Her publications
cover patient-health professional communication, language and
cultural practices in the workplace, English to speakers of other
languages (ESOL) and institutional selection processes and their
potential for indirect discrimination, and in the last five years she
has directed six government funded research projects in these
areas. Following her inaugural lecture at King’s, she was
interviewed by Emily Heavey and Annalisa Fagan.
Celia, what would you say your key research interests are,
and how did they develop?
My interest for a long time, indeed the last thirty years, has been
looking at language and ethnic minority groups and how the
majority society relates to them and positions them and what
access they have to the goods and services in the society in which
they live. And that’s taken many forms, but it’s been my key
interest since the mid-seventies, when I met the sociolinguist
John Gumperz and had the great privilege of working with him.
At the time I was working in a centre in Southall which was one
of the first places many migrants went to live when they came to
Britain. We were working in local factories, teaching English to
migrant workers, and also developing programmes to raise
awareness among supervisors and so on, of what it meant to work
with a very different workforce. So my research interests really
grew out of the practical endeavours of that centre.
So at what point did that shift into academia?
Well again it was working with John Gumperz. Originally I’d
been looking at linguistics, stylistics, and the language of
literature, and I thought I was going to take that route. But I
pretty soon decided that I was really much more interested in talk
and interaction. When I met John Gumperz, I realised that there
was a new theoretical and methodological world developing in
Berkeley, where Gumperz was working with big names in
sociology, like Harvey Sacks, Manny Schegloff, Dan Slobin from
linguistics, and a whole amazing group of people. Together, they
were looking at discourse in interaction, and that’s what really lit
me up. I think of myself today as an interactional sociolinguist,
and I suppose it was that, long before it became widely known as
a discipline. Gumperz was developing his theories when I met
him, so it was a very exciting time to learn about language, talk
and in particular how these things can have a discriminatory
dimension.
What do you mean by the discriminatory dimension? It’s
been quite an important focus of lots of your projects.
Going back to our work in Southall, we knew that most of the
migrant workers were inserted into the labour market based on
available slots, rather than based on their own skills. They were
often highly educated workers doing jobs below their
competence. From then on, I became aware that the way in
which one is evaluated, judged and assessed in ordinary everyday
life and in key ‘gatekeeping’ encounters, is hugely dependent on
language and interaction. Anyone’s judgement of anyone else is
so much based on one’s own way of talking and interacting, and
on the ‘common sense norms’ of the way you should behave.
When people are judged based on norms different from their
own, the chances are that inequalities will be produced and
reproduced in a Bourdieuian sense.
You also write a lot about communication in medicine. How
does that overlap with your work on institutions and
ethnicities?
I like to think of myself as what the French call ‘bricoleur’,
someone who grabs hold of something that’s useful to them and
works with that, but instead of it being ‘things’, for me it’s been
people, and finding things interesting in what they’re doing, that
has led me in various directions. And I got involved in health
communication because I was known for my interest in looking
at inequalities and communication in ethnic minority groups. At
the time, the Royal College of General Practitioners was looking
for a solution to the on-going problem of inequalities in
examination results. So I became involved in looking at the
examination process that they were so concerned about. From
there, I was involved in devising some new projects relating to
doctor-patient communication. So it was my interest in
discrimination that led me to language and health, and I found
that lots of students with a health background wanted the lens of
language and discourse. I don’t see any major fault lines between
my early work on the workplace and my more recent work on
health communication. At heart, I’m still interested in how the
processes and systems of health and its institutionalisation can
produce inequalities for the groups that I’m interested in.
The whole area of health communication seems to be
expanding at the moment, especially at King’s. What’s next?
The health systems are changing hugely and we still have these
persistent inequalities. There are many new technologies that
impact on things, for example, Deborah Swinglehurst works on
the electronic patient records and what this means for the
communication of health. New technologies are having a huge
effect on the communication of health and on the production of
health.
What do you mean by the production of health?
Health is not an absolute experience. It’s something that people
have differing access to, and even in the micro-processes of
doctor-patient communication, individuals can receive different
levels of care, different opportunities for getting access to care,
different reactions to their presentation of symptoms, and so on.
So somebody’s chances of being healthy can rely on these micro-
moments of communication in consultation.
Your current project is on health communication – what does
it involve?
In the current project we are working on, we are taking three
politically charged themes: race and ethnicity, medicine and
health, and testing and assessment, and seeing what happens
when these sets of concerns coalesce. We’re asking how is it that
assessment practices that are supposed to be equal, seem to result
in disadvantage for a particular group, namely those medical
graduates who have trained overseas. That group is less likely
than any other group to pass the licensing exam that will allow
them to act as general practitioners. We’re looking at what it is
about the exam that produces this inequality, and what can be
done to support the graduates themselves, and we’re also trying
to involve the examiners and trainers. It’s a real attempt to bring
together different groups of people with different interests. It’s
not just an academic project, but a project that’s attempting to
tackle a very real problem.
How does it compare to past projects?
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 3
It is easy to see the comparative differences in candidates’
performance in the data set, which was also true in the job
interview research projects I’ve done. But I’m not just interested
in the performance of the candidates, but in how an institution
comes to construct an exam like this. How much is the exam a
product of taken for granted norms, which the institution has
come to view as the fixed ways in which things should be done?
We need to examine the exam, and see to what extent its design
is driven by assumptions that are normative of the group that
designed it, and what effect that has on those taking the exam.
Have any ideologies or politics influenced your work?
In the 70s I was and still am ‘quite a feminist’ and although I
have never worked in language and gender, being involved in
feminism in the seventies has had a huge influence on me. It
makes you feel that you want to discover and take action. If
you’re producing knowledge, you want that knowledge to work
in ways that will make a difference. I’ve always hoped that in
small ways my research will make a difference to the groups I
have worked with. I was first teaching in the East End in the late
sixties. I then did voluntary service overseas in India and then I
went back to the East End and then to Southall, on the other side
of London. So I think I was constantly aware of the growing
diversity. That feminism and that experience of working with
people from very different backgrounds impelled me. I didn’t
have a cut and dried set of ideological beliefs, but rather a
practical orientation to try to work in small ways on obvious
inequalities. (Laughs) Sounds terribly pompous, doesn’t it!
People
Here is news of some of the staff and students affiliated to LDC.
Staff
Simon Coffey (Lecturer in Modern Languages Education)
My big news since the last newsletter is that I finished my PhD.
A great feeling. My research investigated life stories recounted
by British adults who had learnt foreign languages. I found that
the stories told were shaped by available narrative resources and
said as much about the interactional moment as about the
revealed experience of the participants. I have continued to
publish papers and chapters based on my analysis, which has
itself of course continued to evolve since my viva, and have also
been looking increasingly for ways to apply the insights of
language autobiographies to classroom contexts. One of the ways
in here is to align my work with the growing attention to
‘emotion’ in language learning - the insights gained through
teacher and pupil reflexivity and autobiographical reflection can
promote recognition of the emotional engagement with the
language and with the pedagogical moment (the activity, the
setting, the rapport etc) – and I have carried this interest forward
in discussion with colleagues both in LDC and other institutions
(for example, at the ‘Cognition, emotion and communication’
conference at the University of Cyprus (June 2011), where Claire
Kramsch and Aneta Pavlenko were plenary speakers). In
October 2012 I will be teaching an intensive residential course in
Seville, focusing on how teachers can use language learning
autobiographies in their contexts, and I have also just submitted
an eleven-partner bid for European funding to develop
autobiographical materials to support foreign and second
language learning.
Guy Cook (Professor of Language in Education, July 2012 - )
I am looking forward to joining LDC in July this year. I write
about applied linguistics, discourse analysis, English language
teaching, and stylistics, and my current interests are in:
translation and first language use in language learning; discursive
representations of nature; persuasive discourse (especially the
conflict between academic values and public relations in
universities); the language of public debates (especially about
food); and language play.
Guy Cook
Melanie Cooke (Research Associate and Teaching Fellow)
I have been working in the Department of Education &
Professional Studies at King’s for around eight years now, first as
a research associate with Professor Celia Roberts and recently as
a teaching fellow. My first contract here was for two and a half
years, during which time I worked on a project which attempted
to identify effective practice in adult ESOL (the name used in the
UK for the teaching of English to adult migrants). Since then I
have become a bit of a fixture in DEPS and have held a series of
research posts, all broadly in the field of migrant language
education. Just to show how enthusiastic I am about King’s, I
must add that as well as working here I am also a part-time PhD
student, currently in my sixth year (and counting, but hopefully
not for much longer!).
For some years I have also been doing quite a bit of teaching in
DEPS, mainly on the BA English Language & Communication
and the MA English Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics
and in January 2011 I received a contract and became a teaching
fellow in the department. Apart from a greater sense of security
after being hourly paid for some years, this post has brought with
it a new role for me in LDC as ‘harmoniser’ of all the MA
programmes across DEPS and the School of Arts and Humanities
which come under the LDC umbrella, that is, which have a strong
linguistic component. By ‘harmonising’ all the programmes we
offer MA students a broad range of options offered by seven
different MAs. Part of this involves setting up a new lecture
series, the LDC MA Annual Lecture. The first of these took place
in December 2011 and will hopefully become an annual event.
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 4
Roxy Harris (Senior Lecturer in Language in Education)
Since the last LDC newsletter, I have been closely involved with
the ‘Working Group on Sociolinguistic Diversity’ convened by
the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic
Diversity at Göttingen, and three of my students have
successfully obtained their PhDs - Constadina Charalambous
completed in 2009 (funded by the School of Social Science &
Public Policy), and Elsa Rodeck and Cise Barissever completed
in October 2010 (both were also ESRC studentship holders).
In terms of projects and publications, I led a 2009-2011 ESRC
follow-on project ‘Urban Classroom Culture & Interaction (2):
From Research to Professional Practice’, which yielded Urban
Classroom Culture (2011, published by the Centre for LDC), and
a couple of papers have been anthologised: an article on Stuart
Hall in Cultural Studies (2009) has appeared in Stuart Hall and
‘Race’ (edited by Claire Alexander, Routledge, 2011), and a 1997
TESOL Quarterly paper co-authored with Constant Leung and
Ben Rampton has been reproduced in the second edition of
Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader (edited by A. Duranti, Wiley-
Blackwell 2009). I have also contributed to the The Routledge
Applied Linguistics Reader (edited by Li Wei, 2011) and
published an article on the sociolinguistic work of Harold Rosen
in Changing English (2009). One non-‘work’ activity, which
was an enjoyable change, was my ‘In Conversation With...’
session at the Cheltenham Literature festival with former Booker
Prize winning novelist James Kelman.
Roxy Harris at the launch of Urban Classroom Culture
Jane Jones (Senior Lecturer in Modern Foreign Languages
Education)
Since the last newsletter, my research activity has been oriented in
two ways. First, I chair an international EU-funded project on
developing Assessment for Learning across Europe. The group has
held meetings in London, Bergamo, Copenhagen, Barcelona and
Karmoy in Norway, and we have explored our cross-national
case studies, visited schools and attended the local university. I
was a keynote speaker at an associated international conference
attended by 400 participants in Barcelona, and I will be
producing guidelines on Assessment for Learning (AfL) training
for teachers for the Commission. I also addressed the Modern
Foreign Languages (MFL) teachers of Norway in Oslo at their
national conference on assessment in November 2010. My
second line of research activity focusses on developing and
trialling reflective activities on the Common European
Framework of Reference (CEFR) for teachers, and for this, I have
been a member of an 'expert team' based in Austria on behalf of
the Council of Europe.
In terms of teaching, I have been contracted every winter since
2010 as visiting lecturer on the MA programme at the University
of Alcala, Madrid, where I am responsible for the coordination
and teaching of the classroom research and observation module.
The university is housed in lovely historical buildings with state
of the art technology in classrooms, and the town of Alcala
houses hundreds of storks in huge nests on the top of the old
buildings, a marvellous sight and part of the university’s crest.
I have started to work with a network of German and Catalan
kindergartens on aspects of assessment, portfolios and children's
learning stories. I am writing my third book on
MFL/Inclusion/Digital technology with Chris Abbott, and with
Simon Coffey, I am updating our primary languages best-seller.
Jane Jones as key note speaker for the UK at a conference
organized by the Ministry of Education, Barcelona, May 2011.
Eva Ogiermann (Lecturer in English Language & Applied
Linguistics)
I grew up in Poland, got educated in Germany and after teaching
English linguistics at a sleepy University in Northern Germany
for a couple of years, decided to move to the UK. I first did a
post-doc at the University of Portsmouth, where I was working
on a fascinating project, and then worked as lecturer in
Intercultural Communication at the University of Surrey, where I
acquired useful administrative skills. The lecturer post that I have
recently been offered at King’s sounds like the perfect
opportunity to finally settle down! I am looking forward to
meeting everybody – and especially my colleagues at the Centre
for LDC.
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 5
My research revolves around the question of the culture-
specificity of language use. I started exploring this question in
my PhD thesis, which compared English, Polish and Russian
apologies (published with Benjamins in 2009). After completing
my solitary PhD journey I collaborated with various colleagues
on a couple of small projects: one examined the assignment of
grammatical gender to English loanwords in Polish and German;
another one investigated the impact of economic, political and
societal changes on interpersonal communication following the
fall of the Iron Curtain in Poland and Hungary. In Portsmouth I
then worked in the Department of Psychology on an ESRC-
funded project which introduced me to the methods of
Conversation Analysis and where I analysed video-recordings of
Polish and English family conversations. More recently, I have
been looking at recordings of ‘mixed’ – Polish/English – families
and become interested in issues of identity in multilingual
interaction.
Eva Ogiermann
Kieran O’Halloran (Reader in Applied Linguistics)
I joined King’s at the end of 2011, and at present, my main
research focus is on developing a technique for the critical
deconstructive analysis of arguments ('Electronic
Deconstruction'), drawing on social media data and corpus
linguistic methods. More broadly, I am interested in the
application of corpus linguistic method in argumentation studies
and critical discourse analysis, and my publications in this area
include Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Cognition
(Edinburgh University Press, 2003) and Applying English
Grammar: Functional and Corpus Approaches (Hodder Arnold,
2004 with Coffin and Hewings). In addition, I have co-edited
The Art of English: Literary Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan,
2006 with Goodman) and Applied Linguistics Methods: Systemic
Functional Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and
Ethnography (Routledge, 2010 with Coffin and Lillis).
Kieran O’Halloran
Shuangyu Li (Lecturer in Clinical Communication)
I joined the Division of Medical Communication at King’s in
October 2011. Before coming to the UK, I was a lecturer in English
language and a conference interpreter in China, working for NGOs,
educational institutions, international corporations and governments
at different levels. This experience then had a major influence on my
Leeds University PhD research, Understanding Interactions in
Interpreted Triadic Medical Consultations in Primary Care (in the
UK), and this used Conversation Analysis to investigate the
interactional mechanisms in interpreter-mediated medical
consultations. As a lecturer in the Chantler Clinical Skills Centre, I
am now involved in the teaching and development of core clinical
communication skills modules, and I am continuing my research on
how these processes are influenced by ethnic diversity in the UK,
also drawing in sociolinguistics. In addition, I am an Honorary
Tutor, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University.
Shuangyu Li
Julia Snell (Lecturer in Descriptive and Socio-linguistics)
I joined King’s in January 2011 after spending two years working on
a research project with Adam Lefstein at the Institute of Education ,
University of London. During my time at the IOE I visited King’s as
often as I could to attend research events and do the odd bit of
sociolinguistics teaching. Needless to say, I’m delighted that I’ve
now been given a desk and allowed to stay full time! I teach several
modules on the BA English Language & Communication and
supervise MA dissertations on the MA programmes in ELT &
Applied Linguistics and Language & Cultural Diversity.
My main research interests fall within the field of sociolinguistics,
specifically language variation and the sociolinguistics of identity
(especially social class). I’m also interested in ethnographic and
interactional discourse analysis, language ideologies, grammar
teaching and classroom discourse. Like a number of colleagues at
the Centre for LDC, I’m an active member of the Linguistic
Ethnography community. Being part of a stimulating and supportive
research environment has helped to make my first year at King’s
very productive. Internally, I presented my work at RWLL, and the
Social Science & Public Policy Research Conference. Externally, I
presented at several conferences and seminar series, and gave a
keynote talk at the British Association for Applied
Linguistics/Cambridge University Press (BAAL/CUP) Seminar on
‘Language, Education and Disadvantage’. A number of publications
have also come to fruition during this time. Overall I’ve felt
extremely welcomed and supported by colleagues and students alike
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and I look forward to the coming months at King’s, especially
now that I have the privilege of taking up a 12 month ESRC
postdoctoral fellowship here in September.
Brian Street (Emeritus Professor, Language in Education) Ben Rampton writes: During 2010, Brian Street retired and
became an Emeritus Professor at King’s. Brian founded the
Language & Literacy Group in the Department of Education &
Professional Studies, and the huge international impact of his
work is very widely recognised (inter alia in his NRC
Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Award). But beyond the
towering figure of Street the paradigm, I’d suggest that there are
at least three things that really stand out if you work quite closely
with Brian as a colleague. First, his openness and the
encouragement he gives, especially to younger scholars. Even
overhearing undergraduates, you can pick up on the buzz that his
BA literacy classes have always generated, making students feel
like people with something really worth saying academically, and
that was definitely my first experience of him, talking about
network analysis in a bar in Lancaster somewhere in the mid 80s.
Second, worked into the bereted bon viveur, the glass of wine,
and the excellent evenings at the Commonwealth Club, there is
the steely intellect, and what I have really enjoyed most and
would recommend to absolutely everyone is Brian-at-RWLL (our
‘Research Workshop in Language & Literacy’): watch him chair
a seminar, see how he manages to rehabilitate even the whackiest
presentations, using his anthropological habitus to reframe what’s
been said, helping everyone see what really matters in what
we’ve heard. Equally, Brian is really fun to argue with – he’ll
rebuff your very strongest arguments with an amazingly graceful
equanimity, but if you can elicit his mildly quizzical frown, what
a feeling of triumph! Third, there is a Brianist aesthetic which
makes him something of a style icon, an emblem of high high
academic achievement carried modestly, lightly, with
extraordinary open-mindedness, and who knows how important
this could be in the period ahead. Universities have now entered
very difficult and unpredictable times, where the resources of
audit culture may wear rather thin. But our repertoire is stretched
and enriched by the example of Brian, in ways that there is still a
lot more to learn about, and it is our great good fortune that he
will continue as Emeritus in our midst.
Ursula Wingate (Senior Lecturer in Language in Education)
My main interest is academic literacy/English for Academic
Purposes (EAP), and my recent research has been concerned with
applying writing theories to teaching practice, and developing
and evaluating various approaches to teaching writing in higher
education. In an article written with Chris Tribble, we have
questioned the applicability of ‘Academic Literacies’, the
dominant theoretical model in the UK, for ‘mainstream’
instruction in Higher Education, and proposed a complementary
approach, stressing the theoretical and practical value of genre-
based traditions. Building on this work, we have started to
compile corpora of student writing in four disciplines, and
develop genre-specific writing resources from these corpora. This
work is funded by the College Teaching Fund (2011).
From 2009 to 2010, I led the project ‘A model for enhancing the
academic writing and reasoning of King’s undergraduate
students’, also funded by the College Teaching Fund. As an
outcome, five methods of teaching academic writing and
argumentation were integrated into first-year modules, and this
approach was disseminated across the College. From 2009-2011,
I was also a member the European Learning Development Project
‘Practice Enterprise for Language Learning and Intercultural
Communication’ (PELLIC). The project developed a learning
platform where English learners (secondary
school/university/adult education) from across the EU can
enhance their business language skills by trading with virtual
companies.
Yinglin Ji (British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow)
I joined King’s as a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow in
October 2010, and 2011 has been a very exciting year for me.
Three papers of mine, adapted from three main chapters of my
doctoral thesis, were published in Linguistics, Lingua and
Journal of Foreign Languages respectively, and I have received
very positive feedback from peers. My research project on
linguistic and cognitive representation of space in English versus
Chinese is going well. Last year I looked into the issue of second
language acquisition of spatial expressions (motion events in
particular) among English and Chinese L2 learners and its
cognitive implications for the relation between language and
thought in general. Nearly 3,000 responses, which were elicited
from a production task, are being analysed and some preliminary
results show that typological properties of the source language
constrain the way L2 learners acquire spatial expressions in the
target language, therefore suggesting that learning a new
language may imply acquiring a new way of conceptualisation.
The most exciting thing for me in 2011 is of course the birth of
my son Jerry Xuanwei Zhang. Being a mother is the most
wonderful experience in my life, though it is really hard work.
Luckily I have my mother and sister-in-law to offer help at any
moment I need a pair of extra hands. Jerry brought so much joy
and fun to the whole family, and he is making fast progress in
growing up – a real babbler and toddler now!
Jerry
Visiting Researchers
LDC continues to benefit hugely from the very significant presence
of a wide range of visiting scholars – see
www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/ldc/people/visiting-
scholars/index.aspx - and in addition to the feature on Gerlinde
Mautner (p.8), here are reports from just a few of them.
Beatriz Macías Gómez-Stern (Universidad Pablo de Olavide,
Sevilla, Spain)
This academic year has been a very special one for me. It´s not the
first time I’ve spent time abroad, but King’s has been a unique
experience. At LDC, I have interacted with a research field that was
new to me. My background is in Cultural Psychology, and although
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 7
Jane JJsa
this was not the first time I have had intellectual contact with
language studies, I was not aware of sociolinguistics’ internal
debates and theoretical-methodological concerns. I consider my
experience at King’s extraordinarily useful for my future
academic life. It’s not easy to find a group of recognized
academics who have collaboratively worked together for so long,
and keep doing so on a daily basis. This collaborative spirit was
clear in the engaging discussions that take place every week at
the Research Workshop on Language & Literacy. The different
LDC seminars and research days tend to be relaxed settings,
where nevertheless passionate and complex debates take place.
This year I also had time to concentrate on creative work, and
during my visit I achieved the calmness required to concentrate
on thinking, reading and writing. The products are two articles –
one to be published in Culture & Psychology and a second one in
the Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies – where I
have developed my idea of the narrative construction of identities
in Andalusian Southern Spain migrants. I also take home many
ideas that I hope I will develop soon. Needless to say, I have also
enjoyed the fascinating city of London, where you can never
finish exploring.
Miguel Pérez Milans (University of Hong Kong)
2010-2011 has been unique in my academic career and personal
life. I joined LDC with a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the
Spanish Ministry of Education. Things have been so fast and
intense during my time in London, and my whole situation has
changed dramatically for the better. I came alone, facing the
uncertainty of a young researcher who has to deal with the
current international economic crisis and its consequences in
terms of access to university positions in Spain and elsewhere.
One year later, I am leaving London accompanied by my partner
and my newly arrived son, who was born on the 18 January 2011,
having taken advantage of all the material and human resources
provided by King’s. I felt welcome and supported by everyone
involved in the LDC from the very beginning, and have had an
extremely valuable dialogue with everyone via the weekly
RWLL seminars. I have been involved in different research
activities organized here, including participation in one of the
Research Days, an RWLL talk, and the organization of an
international colloquium on youth, interaction and learning, at
which Stanton Wortham, Luisa Martín-Rojo, and Jürgen Jaspers
acted as keynote speakers. In addition, I have had great help and
support from people like Ben Rampton, Roxy Harris, and
Constant Leung. They have given to me the opportunity to
improve and publish research articles (for example, Working
Papers on Urban Language & Literacies) and to get funding
from different institutions (King’s China Institute and Santander-
Autonomous University of Madrid) in order to carry out a new
international and inter-institutional research project involving
King’s College London, Autonomous University of Madrid, and
University of Hong Kong. They also have provided me with
opportunities to establish new networks with other people in the
UK (University of Birmingham, Birkbeck University, and
Institute of Education London), and they supported and
encouraged me in getting a contract with Routledge to publish
my PhD thesis. In sum, my experience at King’s will be always
linked to the development of my professional career and of
course, my new identity as a father!
Patrick Farren (NUI, Galway)
Jane Jones writes: Dr Patrick Farren , Senior Lecturer in MFL
and Gaelic Studies at the National University of Ireland in
Galway (NUIG), spent the Autumn term at King’s as visiting
Scholar with Jane Jones and Simon Coffey. He has pioneered
cross-border projects for language teachers, and in the light of his
interest in critical action research focused training, he has been
commissioned to write a book for Routledge on critically
reflective practice comparing teachers in three settings, Ireland,
England and the US. He spent time with PGCE and MA students
exploring their thinking and development as teachers, mainly in
the College, but sometimes in the pub where lively debate was
enjoyed. He undertook observations and interviews and did some
guest teaching on MFL courses. He also interviewed mentors in
schools. Patrick also enjoyed DEPS seminars and meeting staff
generally. He then moved on to Boston College for the Summer.
Jane has been invited to review the doctoral provision at NUIG
and to be a visiting academic there for a short time next year, and
she and Patrick are co-authoring, among other things pursuing
their interest in language teachers’ portfolios and teachers’ action
research projects.
PhD students
There are 40-50 PhD students affiliated to LDC at any one time,
working in a wide range of areas, including discourse and text
analysis, sociolinguistics, language education, and literacy
studies. And here are some reports from some of the current and
recent doctoral students working in psycholinguistics and health
communication.
Emily Heavey
I am a third year PhD student, supervised by Celia Roberts and
Brian Hurwitz. My research involves a combination of narrative
analysis and conversation analysis and investigates how people
who have undergone physically transformative surgery
(amputations and mastectomies) use language to construct their
bodies. My hope is that my findings will be useful in the rapidly
evolving discipline of narrative medicine. In addition to co-
organising one of the LDC Research Days with Olivia Knapton, I
have been awarded a small sum of money from DEPS to present
my research at several international conferences this year,
including COMET in Trondheim, Narrative Matters in Paris, and
Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines
(CADAAD) in Braga. I am also a part time research assistant for
a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded project at
Queen Mary’s, investigating the effects of surgical intervention
for faecal incontinence.
Joanna John
Joanna began a part-time PhD in psycholinguistics in October
2007 with Gabriella Rundblad, and she has now been awarded a
grant from the University of London Central Research Fund to
support her fieldwork with English-Punjabi bilinguals. Her study
of bilingual language processing explores whether sound
information from Punjabi is active while English-Punjabi
speakers converse in English. Previous research in this area has
focused on bi-literate speakers of two European languages with
limited structural distance between them, but Joanna’s research
focuses on mono-literate participants because many of the
world’s bilinguals access literacy through a single language.
British community languages such as Punjabi have featured little
in psycholinguistic research on bilingual processing, and
Joanna’s study may provide cognitive evidence of the
ethnolinguistic vitality of Punjabi in the UK. In addition, Joanna
is employed four days a week as a Project Leader at the
University of Reading, working on a collaboration targeting
ethnic diversity in teaching.
Olivia Knapton
I am a second year PhD student supervised by Gabriella
Rundblad and Celia Roberts. For my PhD, I am taking a
Cognitive Linguistics approach to investigate how the language
used by people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) may
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 8
shed light on the underlying conceptual structures that maintain
the disorder. My PhD is supported by an ESRC Quota
Studentship and I have recently been awarded an ESRC Overseas
Institutional Visit grant to study for three months in the Division
of Health and Society at the University of Linköping, Sweden. In
February 2012 I co-organised an LDC Research Day on the
theme of Discourse, Body and Mind where I presented the initial
analysis of my PhD data. I have also been busy as a member of
the organising committee for the 4th
conference of the UK
Cognitive Linguistics Association which will be held at King’s in
July 2012. Over the coming summer, I will be presenting both at
this conference and at the Communication, Medicine and Ethics
(COMET) conference in Trondheim, Norway.
Agnieszka Tytus
Agnieszka Tytus, an MPhil/PhD student supervised by Gabriella
Rundblad, has won a small grant from a charitable trust. She is
investigating the way in which word meanings are stored,
accessed and processed in the mental lexicon of bilingual
Chinese-English speakers, and she is currently preparing for her
data collection which will mainly take place at the University of
Hong Kong, one of King’s partner universities.
Jo Van Herwegen
My thesis explored the development of metaphor and metonymy
comprehension in typically developing children and children with
Williams Syndrome, a very rare genetic disorder. By using a
developmental trajectory approach to analyse the data, my study
has been the first to explore how comprehension of metaphor and
metonymy develops in typically developing children as well as to
identify what successful comprehension of these figurative
expressions relates to. In addition, understanding what abilities
are related to successful metaphor and metonymy comprehension
was enhanced by comparing performance in typically developing
children to those with Williams syndrome. I successfully
defended my thesis in April 2010, and after that, I worked on a
small post-doc project investigating Theory of Mind abilities in
Williams Syndrome using an eye-tracker at Middlesex
University. Since September 2010 I have worked as a Lecturer in
Psychology at Kingston University London, but I have also
taught research methods at undergraduate and master’s level at
King’s.
Feature
Interview with Gerlinde Mautner
Gerlinde Mautner is Professor and Director of the Department
of English Business Communication, Vienna University of
Economics and Business in Austria. Her research interests
include corporate and marketing communications, language and
communication design, discourse analysis, and computer-aided
corpus linguistics. The topics she has recently worked on include
the impact of business discourse on other social domains (such
as public administration, higher education and religion),
complaints management, and legal language on public signs.
Gerlinde first visited the Centre for LDC from January to March
2011, and has become a regular face at LDC events since.
Following a fascinating talk on the marketisation of higher
education, she was interviewed by PhD student Johanna
Woydack and Annalisa Fagan.
Gerlinde Mautner
Gerlinde, how have you found your time at King’s?
I’m sorry I have to leave! I enjoyed every minute, both
academically and socially. It has been extremely stimulating and
inspiring, and also very pleasant. Having stayed for stints at
various universities, I have never felt accepted as a guest so
quickly. King’s is so open to outsiders coming to visit and doing
something a little different. I felt my work resonated with both
DEPS and the LDC, and even when my work was not a complete
fit, people were very welcoming and open to my ideas.
How did you become interested in marketisation?
A few years ago, I was part of university management, but still a
professor full-time. I therefore had the kind of ‘split identity’
quite typical of so-called "manager-academics". It felt almost
serendipitous that in 2002 the university, under new management,
started to ‘brand’ itself as an entrepreneurial university. This
triggered my analytic sensibilities. You could see what was
occurring, in both the non-profit and public sectors.
Do you see many differences between Austrian and British
universities?
There are considerable structural and organizational differences
but equally striking similarities. In terms of marketisation
trends and language, the countries are very similar, with the UK
being a step ahead. Branding has always been linked into
marketisation and has been around for a very long time, if used as
a broad term. Saying this, although similar phenomena may have
appeared in the past, we should not overlook that there has been a
qualitative change and the grand narrative has changed.
So much money is spent in universities on branding
(changing logos etc). Is it worth it and how much advantage
does it actually have?
The question is how much is acceptable, how glossy do
brochures and posters need to be? A university may feel like
they need a new logo as everyone else has one, and maybe an
accreditation team has told them to increase their international
visibility. A cynic might say that branding is easier to do than
other things, such as improving the teaching or IT infrastructure...
These days, even world class institutions like King’s, which
everyone already knows because of their reputation, engage in
marketing and branding.
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 9
Marketisation is very interesting as it has a momentum of its own
and even powerful people seem unable to step off the train.
There is also an unwanted paradoxical side effect of branding
yourself – when everyone does it, it has the effect of
homogenization. If many institutions are performing to certain
standards, each one needs more branding to make it stand out.
Have there been any recent changes in the discourses of
marketisation?
Interestingly, the credit crunch has not paused the train of
marketisation and there has been no real change, even though the
financial crisis has made the failings of market capitalism emerge
quite clearly. Marketisation appears to be a strong ideological
construct that is impervious to changes in reality.
What are students’ and teachers’ roles in this?
I would like to think that individuals can resist dominant
discourses, but I am unsure how much, as individuals tend to
orientate towards sources of power (which often means sources
of money as well). If university management uses marketised
language, then faculty often follow suit, and students are
socialised into these discourses too. Individual acts of
accommodation lead to solidified discursive practice. Eventually
there are terms like ‘business plan’ for which there appear to be
no other words to accurately describe the concept. However, I do
believe that those of us who are higher up on the career ladder
with relatively secure jobs are uniquely placed to do something
about this discursive shift. If tenured faculty don't speak out
against marketisation, who will?
Are there any exceptions to the language of marketisation?
My hunch is that no area is totally untouched, but we should not
be oblivious to counter discourses. Recently I was invited onto a
radio programme and we had time for three callers, all of whom
were passionate about language changing in that way and very
articulate in their resistance.
Can marketisation have positive effects?
There are some positives: for example, old hierarchical
discourses have been challenged and in some cases shot to
pieces. It would be totally misguided to return to old-style,
hierarchical discourse merely out of a sense of nostalgia. On the
other hand, because of the dialectic between language and
society, taking marketised discourse on board isn't merely
something that remains on the linguistic surface, but invariably
has an impact on values, relationships and organizational
identities.
Events and meetings
The LDC Research Day is a bi-annual, half-day event on a
dedicated topic, usually consisting of a data session, a discussion
of research literature and a keynote talk. Since the last
newsletter, we have hosted five Research Days, covering a
diverse range of themes, from discourses of the classroom to
discourses of the body and mind. In November 2009, we had a
Research Day exploring ‘voice’ in text and talk, with a keynote
talk by Janet Maybin (Open University). In March 2010, we
explored perspectives on translation, covering translation in
ethnography, linguistic analysis and literary analysis. The
following December saw a fascinating discussion of order and
disorder in the classroom, with talks from visiting researchers
Branca Falabella Fabricio and Miguel Pérez Milans (see p.7), and
a keynote talk in which Roxy Harris scrutinised teasing and
banter. Our research day in 2011 focussed on institutional
discourses, with Rachel Robinson (Open University) leading a
talk on medical education, PhD student Johanna Woydack
leading a discussion of Gumperz, and a keynote talk on
‘marketisation’ by our visitor Gerlinde Mautner (see p.8). Most
recently, we hosted a Research Day on different discourses of the
body and mind. PhD students Olivia Knapton and Emily Heavey
discussed conceptual metaphor use in people with OCD and the
narrative reconstruction of illness identities, and we were visited
by Kevin Harvey (University of Nottingham), who delivered a
keynote talk on using corpus linguistics to interrogate health
communication. As ever, all Research Days were followed by
further scintillating discussion and wine!
The LDC Seminars is our series of stand-alone talks by invited
speakers, and along with the LDC Colloquia, they have seen a
range of speakers come to King’s over the last two years. Gill
Valentine (Geography, Leeds) talked to us about identities and
belonging, and Sandro Duranti (Anthropology, University of
California, Los Angeles) discussed the relationship between
sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology at one session, and
the relevance of Husserl's work to language socialisation at
another. Elinor Ochs (Anthropology, UCLA) reflected on her
career in language and culture analysis, Dionysos Goutsos
(University of Athens) talked about plant pots, ashtrays and
corpus linguistics, and Ray McDermott (Education, Stanford
University) considered the sociology of the scratch. In 2010,
Charles Briggs (Anthropology, Berkeley) talked about language,
agency and the production of failed patients in news coverage of
health, Frederick Erickson (Education, UCLA) introduced a
micro-ethnography of social interaction, and David Block
(Institute of Education, London) discussed social class in applied
linguistics. In 2011, we had Stanton Wortham (Education,
University of Pennsylvania) discussing youth, interaction and
learning, as well as Gerlinde Mautner (Vienna University of
Economics and Business) exploring language and the market
society.
On 7 December 2011, LDC hosted its first Annual MA Lecture.
Brian Street, Emeritus Professor, discussed his research in the
field of ‘New Literacy Studies’. Drawing on ethnographic
projects in India, Ethiopia, Uganda and elsewhere, he showed the
importance of taking social context into account in the study and
teaching of literacy and he considered how the ‘social turn’
emerged in the teaching and learning of language in the UK. He
also presented the findings and implications of a recent research
project with Constant Leung on ‘EAL and Academic Literacies’,
which attempted to apply a social perspective to learning and
teaching in the last years of school and the first year of
university. The lecture was followed by the LDC Christmas
party.
The last two years have also seen a continuation of the Micro-
Discourse Analysis data sessions. These are thrice termly
workshops in which PhD students and visiting scholars are
invited to bring a few minutes of data for two hours of rigorous
scrutiny in a roundtable environment, and they often comment
afterwards that this provides a fascinating opportunity to see their
data in new ways.
The Centre is also a gateway to three more specialised forums,
which also host guest speakers: Current Issues in Psychology &
Cognitive Processes seminar series (PCP), held four times per
term; Research Workshops in Language and Literacy (RWLL),
held once a week; and workshops and seminars in Language,
Media and Culture, held once per term. To keep track of LDC
academic events, and see a full list of past events, visit our
research seminars webpage,
www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/ldc/seminars/index.aspx
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 10
and for fortnightly updates on upcoming LDC events, see our
news and events page
www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/ldc/news/index.aspx
Emily Heavey
Upcoming Linguistics Conference
The 4th
UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference (UK-CLC4) will be
organised by Gabriella Rundblad and colleagues in
PCP/LDC/DEPS, this summer (10-12 July 2012). Cognitive
Linguistics is an inherently interdisciplinary enterprise which is
broadly concerned with the connection between language and
cognition in relation to body, culture and contexts of use. The
event features an excellent line up of keynote speakers: Stephen
Levinson, George Lakoff, Gilles Fauconnier, Elena Lieven,
Martin Pickering and Lawrence Barsalou. The conference will be
opened by Vice-Principal Professor Eeva Leinonen. More
information about the conference and the call for papers can be
found at www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/education/events/ukclc4/
Funded projects
Crossing Languages & Borders: Intercultural Language
Education in a Conflict-troubled society
Across Europe, intercultural understanding has become a central
objective for Modern Foreign Language education (MFLE). But
this development hasn’t adequately reckoned with situations of
intense recent hostility, and it is unable to address the ideological
and interactional processes identified in recent research on
Turkish-as-an-MFL in Greek-Cypriot secondary classrooms.
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2012-15, this project will
develop an analysis of these processes through the cross-
institutional comparison of ‘Other’-language classes over time.
The project extends the sociolinguistic theory of language
crossing, provides a vocabulary to understand the complexity of
other-language learning practices in post-conflict settings, and
seeks to build new links between sociolinguistics, MFLE and
peace education. It is directed by Ben Rampton, and the co-
applicants are Constadina Charalambous (European University of
Cyprus, and LDC PhD in 2009), and Roxy Harris.
Language and Cognition in Public Health
Gabriella Rundblad and colleagues recently submitted their final
reports for two projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs/the
Drinking Water Inspectorate. The projects focussed on public
understandings of health advice and the role that language and
media reports played in compliance with official advice during
two incidents of water contamination, and they have yielded a
wide range of conclusions and recommendations relevant to
national and international water industries. The findings link the
language of health communication with shared cognition,
perception and behaviour; they highlight the impact of linguistic
techniques/preferences; and they have implications for both
public health communication and cognitive psychology. The
research also helped to reconcile the often disjointed fields of
cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, and in 2011, the first
article published from these projects was shortlisted from among
the 219 journals published by BioMed Central for their annual
Research Award in Medicine. Based on the outcomes and
methodological advances, Gabriella and colleagues in the UK
and the US have recently started a new two-year project,
‘Consumer Perceptions and Attitudes towards EDCs and PPCPs
in Drinking Water’, funded by the US Water Research
Foundation. For more information, please visit:
www.PublicHealthCommunication.org.uk
Performance Issues in the Clinical Skills Assessment (CSA)
for Membership of the Royal College of General
Practitioners: A Knowledge Transfer Project
Knowledge Transfer Partnerships is a UK-wide programme to
encourage collaboration between academic institutions and the
private or public sector, working together on an agreed research
topic. The RGCP and King’s, together with the University of
Cardiff Medical School, have formed a team to investigate CSA
performance issues and the extent to which linguistic and cultural
factors contribute to the poorer performance of international
medical graduates in the Royal College's Membership
examination. The project aims to develop an analytic framework
and to produce training materials that raise the awareness of
examiners, trainers and candidates, and it will collect up to 200
video recordings, elicit feedback from examiners, and micro-
analyse a subset of the video data with interactional
sociolinguistic methods. Running from 2011 to 2013, the project
is funded by the Technology Strategy Board and the Academy of
Royal Medical Colleges, and the team consists of Celia Roberts
(Principal Investigator, LDC), Fiona Erasmus (RCGP), Kamila
Hawthorne (University of Cardiff Medical School) and Sarah
Atkins (Research Associate, LDC).
Urban Classroom Culture and Interaction 2: From Research
to Professional Practice
Both in public and policy discourse, urban secondary classrooms
are commonly regarded as chaotic, and this is usually attributed
to the backgrounds of the pupils or the incompetence of their
teachers. But earlier ESRC research based in LDC – ‘Urban
Classroom Culture and Interaction’ (UCCI-1) - suggested that
there is a different kind of order in these classrooms - pupils'
conduct often simply reflects contemporary social norms, and it
is often impossible to segregate schools from the influence of
popular and new media culture. Unfortunately since the 1990s,
teacher development programmes have provided teachers with
very little scope for addressing this openly, so this ESRC Follow-
on project set out to create opportunities for this, using the
methods and findings of the earlier research to enable teachers to
formulate their own practical responses to the conditions where
they work. The project ran from 2009 to 2011 and the project
team was Roxy Harris (Director), Adam Lefstein, Constant
Leung and Ben Rampton. It developed professional development
materials which help teachers to discuss whether it is okay, for
example, for pupils to opt out of whole class dialogue, whether
they should be allowed to listen to mp3 players as they work, and
whether they should be treated as subordinate learners or as
sociable young adult consumers alert to their rights. The
resource materials consist of a 94 page book of activities,
transcripts and readings, as well as a CD of classroom talk and
other relevant recordings, and they can be downloaded free from
www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/ldc/publications/index.aspx
Collaborations
UPenn-King’s Collaborative Link
Institutional links between the Department of Education &
Professional Studies (DEPS) at King’s and the Graduate School
of Education at University of Pennsylvania (UPennGSE) started
in 1994, with the appointment of Brian Street as Professor of
Language in Education at King’s. Brian’s links with GSE date
www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 11
back to 1984, and he has maintained contacts ever since. Many
staff from UPenn have visited London, colleagues in DEPS have
frequently attended the UPenn Ethnography Forum, and in 2009,
it was agreed that these connections should be extended to
graduate students, who would also take the lead in organisation.
So termly video-seminars now form one ingredient in this, where
students discuss, for example, discourse analysis, teaching
writing, teacher inquiry, language arts education in US urban
schools, and notions of ESOL in the UK, backed up by an LDC
on-line forum where hand-outs and PowerPoints can be found.
There is also now a Penn-King’s Collaborative Link Facebook
page, and this year there will be a visit from UPenn to King’s
from 28 May to 31 May, involving 12 PhD students as well as
Professors Susan Lytle and Gerald Campano. Among other
things, we are holding a one-day colloquium during their visit
(‘Transatlantic dialogue on research in language and literacy’),
and plans for a reciprocal visit in February 2013 are now in
development.
Weronika Górska
Collaborative exchange with the University of the Western
Cape
LDC has just established a three year programme of staff and
doctoral student exchanges with the Department of Linguistics at
the University of the Western Cape, supported by the Hilden
Charitable Fund, the Principal’s Initiative Fund, the School of
Social Science & Public Policy, and the Department of Education
& Professional Studies. The UWC Linguistics Department “is
heir to a proud tradition of putting research and teaching at the
service of the local community and its striving for equitable
transformation”, and it has been pursuing a 10-year research
programme on Multilingualism in Society, guided by an acute
awareness of the importance of history in understanding
multilingual dynamics, social relevance and critical
involvement. At LDC, we have particular strengths in research on
language and literacy in globalisation and intercultural contact
(focusing on language, literacy and discourse in everyday
interaction, in education, in popular culture, in new & mass
media, and in medical and workplace settings), and there is a
substantial group of staff and research students with similar
interests in both sites. The exchange began this year, with a
terrific visit in March from Professor Charlyn Dyers, who
participated in a range of seminars and classes, and presented two
papers – ‘Languages and literacy in superdiversity in one African
township’ and ‘Neither hapless nor hopeless: Portable
multiliteracies, discourses and agency in a ‘township of migrants’
in Cape Town’. In April, Fiona Willans will be spending some
time at UWC, followed in September by Simon Coffey and
Ursula Wingate.
Max Planck Working Group on Sociolinguistic Diversity
Building on longstanding links with Jan Blommaert and
Normann Jørgensen, Ben Rampton and Roxy Harris have co-
founded an international collaboration between sociolinguistics
staff and students at the Universities of Tilburg, Copenhagen,
Jyväskylä, Birmingham, UWC and the Max Planck Institute for
the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen.
Starting in 2009-10 and supported with funding from a range of
sources (including Max Planck and the Danish Council for
Strategic Research), the Working Group has been meeting for
two days once or twice a year, with one day devoted to
organisation and the other focusing on new work by both doctoral
and established researchers. Some of this work has been
published in the LDC working paper series, Working Papers in
Urban Language & Literacies (31 papers since the start of 2010),
and there is some high profile productivity in, among other
things, an international conference in Jyäskylä planned for 2013
(5-7 June), and a special double issue of Diversities, a journal
that Max Planck publishes jointly with Unesco. The ideas
developed in the Working Group have provided part of the
rationale underpinning the King’s-UWC exchange, and it also
forms the core of a larger network of researchers addressing
similar themes – InCoLaS, the International Consortium on
Language and Superdiversity. We are hoping to host a one-day
InCoLaS meeting in London in the spring of 2013, and our
website will very soon go live at www.mmg.mpg.de/
And finally...
Julia Snell brings sociolinguistics to the public
I have presented at a variety of conferences in my first year at
King’s, but perhaps the highlight of my year was talking to
Stephen Fry about language and social class for his Radio 4 show
Fry’s English Delight (broadcast on 1 August 2011). The show
prompted a flurry of media activity, with follow-up articles on
accents and class appearing in The Daily Telegraph and The
Daily Mail, and a phone-in on the topic conducted by Radio 5
Live (which shows of course that the public really are interested
in sociolinguistics)! I learned a lot about the media during that
week (especially how print journalists “make” news). I also
learned that standing next to the colossal Stephen Fry makes me
look like a very small child. You can listen to the recording at
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00jjfkk
Julia Snell
Julia Snell and Stephen Fry