EL&C Research Projects
Staff in the English Language and Communication group are engaged in a wide range of current projects. You can get a flavour of some of these here:
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CLASA: A study of Classroom Language and Student Aspirations in the UK
Funded by SSAHRI grant, UH.
This project is linked to the project below, examining men in primary school teaching. It pieces together two unique areas of research of classroom linguistics and student aspirations, positioning UH as a lead institute in the understanding of gender linguistics and future career choice. It will provide novel insight in to the national/ international debate on the impact of gender role in job choice (male primary school teachers/nurses or women in directorships or STEM subjects); contribute to campaigns to de-gender occupations, increase men in AHSSBL occupations in line with the Equality Challenge Unit expansion in 2015 to include AHSSBL jobs, and result in a Corpus publicized on Corpus Resource Database (currently, few databases exist in this area making it difficult for researchers to find such annotated texts).
Key themes:
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Does Gender Matter? An investigation of proactive and reactive classroom management strategies
(2015- to date)
Collaborative work with the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Funded by Santander Collaboration Grant, UH.
The language used by men in primary school teaching has rarely been addressed in linguistic study. This work addresses this gap. Moreover, it will investigate potential links between teacher gender and pupil’s notions of achievement in core subjects and future occupational goals. The project is building links, strengthening external partnership and knowledge transfer; potential input into future teacher training policy and curriculum (understanding if teachers' speech style/ gender has significant effect on how children learn). It will contribute to the production of teaching training manuals/workshops for teachers/teacher educators; offer a cross-cultural comparison of teaching styles; contribute to campaigns to de-gender occupations, increase men in AHSSBL occupations in line with the Equality Challenge Unit expansion in 2015 to include AHSSBL jobs.
Key Themes:
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ELT teachers' stories of resilience
(forthcoming 2017)
This British-Council funded project will take the form of a narrative inquiry, analysing the experiences of early career ELT teachers in Brazil and the UK as storied phenomena. It will inquire into language teachers' resilience including its impact on professional identity (re)-construction. It will also look at the challenges and opportunities of stories of resilience and how these impact learners, practitioners and teaching contexts more broadly.
Key Themes:
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Intercultural encounters through conversations about music
(2016 – to date)
Collaborative work with a colleague from the Open University.
The first phase of this collaborative research will start by researching ourselves, using auto-ethnography, a research approach which analyses personal experience so that cultural experience may be understood (Ellis et al 2010). It will experiment with this research approach by looking at how our own experiences of music across cultures and languages impacts or shapes our identity while also developing our understanding of this still somewhat infrequently used research methodology. We then hope to develop this research by using narrative inquiry to look at choir leaders’ and choir members’ experiences of singing in different languages, how these experiences impact their identity, and how, if at all, intercultural citizenship is fostered.
Key Themes:
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Super-diversity in the university classroom
(forthcoming 2017)
Funded by HBS Learning & Teaching Award. Collaborative work with colleagues from the Business School, UH.
There is a significant proportion of students with diverse cultural background studying at HBS and at UH more widely. The present project will examine what students and staff perceive as the most relevant challenges and opportunities resulting from this high level of internationalisation or super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007) in order to identify a list of challenges typical of multicultural classrooms. The project will investigate teaching and learning in this context with special emphasis on assessment and feedback.
The project will apply the concept of intercultural competence (Byram, 1997; Deardorff, 2006) to identify a list of competences to meet challenges and to establish a list of successful strategies applied by students and staff to cope with challenges and take advantage of the opportunities.
Key Themes:
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Word Access
(2016 – to date)
Funded by: UH Proof of Concept: Route to Market
Words are the building blocks of language. How words are accessed is important for word learning and literacy in monolingual and bilingual children as well as for understanding word finding difficulties associated with different conditions (Dyslexia, developmental language disorders, Dementia and stroke). The methodology of eye tracking allows an insight into the mental processes of subjects during on-screen tasks. Previous research in this area has shown that both sound and meaning similarity affect word access in adults: speakers look at the target and a competitor longer than at unrelated items. Bilingual speakers are additionally affected by sound similarity across languages, i.e. if a word in language A sounds similar to a word in language B. These effects show that words in both languages of a bilingual are activated when subjects process language, regardless of the specific language trigger. The current project looks at groups of monolingual English speakers (adults and children) as well as groups of German/English bilingual speakers (adults and children) to assess the extent of within and across-language competition in visual word paradigms in both adults and children.
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