PhD Supervision Interests

Language Online. Local literacies; Vernacular literacies; Ethnographic studies of literacy practices in communities, workplaces, educational settings and online; The textually mediated social world; Adult literacy education; The language practices of Web2 sites such as Flickr.

Current Teaching

Undergraduate: Language in the media.

MA: Digital Language and Literacies

MA and PhD: Qualitative Research Methods

The MA in Digital Language and Literacies, started in October 2012. Come to Lancaster for a year!!!

Research Interests

I am Professor of Language and Literacy and Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre www.literacy.lancs.ac.uk. I am currently interested in all aspects of language online, including the interaction of words and images, multilingual issues, changes to vernacular practices and learning. I am especially interested in language on the photo-sharing site Flickr. I am also writing about methodology, especially ethnographic approaches to literacy research. Also academics writing.

The book Language Online by David Barton and Carmen Lee was published by Routledge in April 2013.

The book Local literacies by David Barton and Mary Hamilton has been re-issued in 2012 as a Routledge Linguistics Classic with a new overview chapter. 

The Anthropology of Writing: Understanding textually mediated worlds edited by David Barton and Uta Papen and published by Continuum is now available in paperback. Download the first chapter.

I enjoyed writing a paper on being stranded by the volcanic ash cloud in April 2010: Barton, D. (2011) People and technologies as resources in times of uncertainty.Mobilities,6(1) 57-65.

My book Literacy has come out in Greek and is published by Papazisi publishers, Athens and is being published in Korean by Honsei University Press. 

And a couple of other recent papers:

Barton, D. & Lee, C. 2012, Redefining Vernacular Literacies in the Age of Web 2.0, Applied Linguistics. 33, 3, p. 282-298.

Barton, D. 2012, Participation, deliberate learning and discourses of learning online, Language and Education. 26, 2, p. 139-150.

My Literacies book series with Routledge is thriving, the latest volume being Literacy and the politics of representation, by Mary Hamilton.

Additional Information

Books

• The Anthropology of Writing: Understanding textually-mediated worlds. Continuum, 2010. (edited with Uta Papen.)
• Improving Learning in College. Routledge, 2009. (written with lots of other people, especially Roz Ivanic.)
• Responding to People's Lives. Leicester: NIACE, 2008. (with Y. Appleby)
• Literacy, Lives and Learning. Routledge, 2007. (with R. Ivanic, Y. Appleby, R. Hodge, K. Tusting)
• Literacy: an introduction to the ecology of written language, Blackwell, 2nd edition, 2007
• Models of Adult Learning, Leicester: NIACE, 2006. (with K. Tusting)
• Beyond Communities Of Practice: Language, Power And Social Context. Cambridge University Press, 2005. (ed. with K. Tusting)
• Letter writing as a social practice, John Benjamins, 2000. (ed. with N. Hall)
• Situated Literacies Routledge, 2000. (ed. with Mary Hamilton and Roz Ivanic)
• Local Literacies: Reading and writing in one community, Routledge, 1998. (with Mary Hamilton)
• Worlds of literacy (co-editor, Multilingual Matters, 1994)
• Sustaining local literacies (editor, Multilingual Matters, 1994)
• Writing in the community (co-editor, Sage, 1992)

See also the publications page of the Literacy Research Centre, http://www.literacy.lancs.ac.uk/resources/publications.htm

And please note that the NRDC Report listed here and under others under eprints, below, can be downloaded here

D. Barton, K. Tusting, R. Hodge & Y. Appleby, (2008) Learners' experience of work. London: National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC).

• Adult Learners' Lives

  01/09/2003 → 31/03/2005
  Adult Learners' Lives was a major project funded by the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy. The aim was to understand the connections between adults' lives and ba ... Read more»

• Lynde Tan's PhD

  21/03/2011
  Lynde Tan was today awarded a PhD subject to corrections for her thesis: Adolescent literacies, multimodal textual repertoires, and digital media: exploring sites of digital literacy practices and le ... Read more»

• Linguistics colleagues present at Georgetown University Roundtable

  11/03/2011
  Ruth Wodak, David Barton and Johann Unger are presenting at Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics: Discourse 2.0 Language and New Media today. For details of the panel, conven ... Read more»

• Ruby Chen's PhD!

  01/02/2011
  Ruby Chen's PhD thesis was passed after a viva on Friday. The title of her thesis is: "The digital literacy practices of adolescents on a college-affiliated bulletin board system (BBS) in Taiwan". T ... Read more»

• David Barton is back from Hong Kong

  31/07/2010
  ... where he was a plenary speaker at the 17th International Conference on Learning, and presented a paper on ethnographic methodology at The University of Hong Kong. He also undertook research at t ... Read more»

• New research briefing on Digital Literacies published

  01/02/2010
  The research briefing on Digital Literacies written by Julia Gillen and David Barton for the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme is now availab ... Read more»

• Irish Independent article recommends literacy research to be carried out in Ireland

  02/06/2008
  An article in the Irish Independent on May 21 recommended that literacy research should be carried out in Ireland based on that carried out in Lancaster by Profs David Barton and Mary Hamilton of the ... Read more»

• Literacy, Lives and Learning book launch

  21/11/2007
  A book launch was held on Tuesday 20th November to celebrate the publication of Literacy, Lives and Learning by members of the Literacy Research Centre, David Barton, Roz Ivanic, Yvon Appleby, Rachel ... Read more»