PhD Supervision - Areas of Interest
This page provides information about staff areas of interest/expertise with regards to PhD supervision. Additionally, some staff have keywords/tags to describe their research and teaching interests, enabling you to search for a supervisor using these keywords/tags.

PhD Students
I will be on sabbatical from August 2012-August 2013 and will not be able to take any new students until I return.
Most of my PhD students are involved in corpus linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, language and identities or a combination of these. My current PhD students are working on the following topics:
- the construction of gender identity in Iranian bloggers
- a corpus study examining how The Guardian reports on the topic of journalism.
- a corpus-based comparison of two academic books about Wahhabi Islam, focussing on the use of collocation to create ideology
- a corpus study examining construction of in and out groups in American newspapers.
Recent PhDs I supervised to completion:
- 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

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.

I am especially interested in supervising PhD students in the areas of language testing (in particular, for academic purposes), and reading and listening research (in particular, reading/listening in a foreign language and academic reading/listening).
I am currently supervising PhD students working on the following themes:
- Quantitative modelling of difficulty in reading test items
- Exploring anchor-based methods for judgementally estimating item difficulty in English for academic purposes reading test items
- Investigating the construct of Language in Use tasks
- Investigating the characteristics of language test specifications and item writer guidelines, and their effect on item development
- Teacher-prepared coursework assessments and curriculum reform
- Washback of the Exit-Level Examination Reform for Foreign Languages in Austria

At doctoral level I welcome applications to research oral second language pedagogy, oral second language development, and the relationship between the deployment of tasks and language use and development within language pedagogy.

- 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)

I welcome potential doctoral students studying children's and teenagers' digital literacies; literacies in early childhood; multimodality in various contexts; historical and contemporary studies of communication technologies where language is the particular focus. I am open to a broad range of topics and methodologies.
A recent PhD I have supervised to completion: S-Y Ruby Chen: Adolescents' linguistic practices in College-affiliated Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) in Taiwan.
Recent doctoral dissertations I have examined include:
Lynde Tan, PhD. Lancaster University.Adolescent literacies, multimodal textual repertoires, and digital media: exploring sites of digital literacy practices and learning inside and outside school. 2011
Mark Childs, PhD. University of Warwick. Learners' experience of presence in virtual worlds. 2010
Patrick Camilleri, EdD., University of Sheffield. A structurational interpretation of issues underlying the implementation of internet based systems in Malta. 2009
Michael Dunne, EdD., Manchester Metropolitan University. Out-of-classroom visits: Unravelling the experience of a short residential trip of primary school children. 2009
Jing Sheng, PhD., Lancaster University. Chinese migrant children's multiliteracy practices in Britain. 2009

I would be especially interested in supervising PhD candidates working in the following areas:
- corpora of languages other than English - and in alphabets other than Latin;
- development and applications of corpus annotation ("tagging" at various levels);
- corpus-based grammatical analysis, especially cross-linguistic and/or quantitative approaches to grammar;
- investigating languageusing statistical collocation;
- the exploitation of corpus methods and resources in the other fields of the humanities and social sciences (e.g. history);
- or, more generally, in any area coherent with my research interests.

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in any of the following areas:
- Language testing (particularly listening assessment, pronunciation assessment, specific purposes language testing, assessor decision-making and topics concerning the challenges of English as an International Language for language testing)
- Second language listening comprehension
- Attitudes towards accents and their impact on comprehension

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 welcome applications in the areas of phonological theory and analysis, morphological theory and analysis, the description of the phonology and morphology of understudied languages (especially the languages of Africa) and English phonology and morphology.

I regret that I cannot take on any new PhD students at the moment.

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 affectivevariables in L2 learning, language learning motivation, special educational needs in language learning and teaching.

I have supervised more than 25 PhD theses to completion, and I welcome applications in the areas of academic discourse, media discourse, environmental discourse, and qualitative research methods.

Ethnographic studies of literacy practices in various settings (e.g. institutions, workplaces, communities, etc.)
Cross-cultural studies of literacy
Electronic literacies
Health and literacy
Literacy in schools
Literacy, language and tourism
Adult literacy education in the so-called developing countries

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the area of second language acquisition, in particular, the roles of tasks, input, interaction, and individual differences in SLA.

I am currently (co-)supervising six PhD students and am interested in PhD proposals in the areas of:
- interlanguage pragmatics,
- cross-cultural pragmatics,
- pragmatic development,
- pragmatics and the study abroad context.

I would be interested in supervising research on the following topics especially:
Bilingualism, code-switching (particularly written code-switching, multilingual literacies and multilingual texts and signs), pidgins and creoles, sociolinguistics of orthography

I currently supervise eight PhD students, working on a variety of projects in stylistics, metaphor studies, and discourse analysis. I am interested in supervising students in the following areas:
- 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 and fictional minds.
- Corpus stylistics: application of corpus methods to the study of literary texts.
- Metaphor studies: metaphor in literature, politics, science, health communication; integration of Cognitive metaphor theory with stylistics and discourse analysis; use of corpus-based methods in the study of metaphorical patterns in texts.

I am happy to supervise students in most areas of stylistics (poetry, fictional prose and drama), film dialogue (and its interaction with non-linguistic factors in film) and theories in relation to interpretation and/or evaluation. Many (but not all) of my current students are working on a combination of traditional stylistic analysis and corpus-based work on texts. I have strong current interests in the study of (a) viewpoint, (b) speech, writing and thought presentation, (c) the analysis of drama and film dialogue (and how it is connected with performance and production/filmic factors) and (d) how stylistics can inform literature teaching and the integration of language and literature teaching in mother-tongue or second/foreign language situations .

I am interested in supervising doctoral work on most aspects of gender and language/discourse, including language/discourse as they pertain to language education, to children's fiction and to African contexts. In particular, I would be interested in supervising a doctoral project on the relationship between the Harry Potter series and boys' literacies. I am currently supervisingfour full-time students PhD and three part-time PhD students.
The topics I am currently supervising include:
- gender and swearing in Kuwaiti Arabic
- gendered discourses around domestic responsibilities in a UK African disapora
- changing gender representation in EFL textbooks in Hong Kong
- EFL students' use of digital media in classroom learning
- celebrity masculinity in Japanese newspapers
- the reception of children's picturebooks featuring two-Mum and two-Dad families
- 'voice' in Mexican undergraduate's dissertations written in English
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I am interested in supervising doctoral students working in the following areas:
- literacy studies, including workplace literacies, audit cultures and accountability, digital literacy practices, literacy practices in religious communities, and adult literacy.
- linguistic ethnography
- communities of practiceand situated learning.
- institutional ethnography
- discourse analysis

I am particularly interested in supervising students in the areas of 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 co-supervising students working on parliamentary debates in Kenya, Arabic media constructions of Iraq, and Maasai identity.

I have until recently and/or am currently supervising doctoral students in the areas of second language literacy practices in higher education, teacher cognition, electronic whiteboard technology, self-efficacy in language learning, continuing professional development, expertise in materials design and in materials evaluation, the role of the teacher in content-based instruction, and attitudes towards English as an International Language in 'TESEP' settings. My own main current research interests are language teaching materials and methodology, language teacher learning, the management of innovation in language education, and the applied linguistics/language teaching interface. However, due to my imminent retirement, I regret that I am no longer able to accept any further PhD students.

I am especially interested in receiving proposals in the following areas:
- Language and religion/spirituality
- Language and psychoanalysis
- Language and personality
- The linguistics of altered states of consciousness
- The discourse of fashion (including non-verbal aspects)

Discourse Studies (theories, methodologies)
Identity Politics (individual, collective; national, transnational)
Language and/in Politics
Discrimination, Racism, Anti-Semitism, and Xenophobia in/via Discourse
Analysis of Media
Critical Discourse Analysis
Important Note
If you wish to contact an individual member of staff with a query about research, please feel free to do so. However, please UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES send multiple copies of identical or almost identical emails to several or all members of staff. This wastes a great deal of staff time and may cause confusion about who is replying to your query. If the person you contact feels unable to help you, they will normally forward your message to someone who can. If you receive no reply, this may be because the addressee is on leave or at a conference; in this case, please make contact again after waiting a little while. Alternatively contact either Elaine Heron (e.heron@lancaster.ac.uk) or Marjorie Wood (m.f.wood@lancaster.ac.uk) and they will either answer your query or forward it to the most appropriate
