EL&C Research Projects

(2015 – to date)

Funded by SSAHRI Multidisciplinary grant, UH.

Dr Saskia Kersten

Higher education is awash with buzzwords, partnership and partners being two that have gained prominence in recent years. While partnership and partners appear frequently within higher education learning and teaching discourse, there is little consensus about what partnership is (Healey et al. 2014). This interdisciplinary project, Saskia Kersten and Karen Smith (School of Education) investigate the discursive profile of partnership, using a mixed methods approach using corpus-assisted discourse studies (see e.g. Partington, Duguid & Taylor 2013) and broadly following Mautner (2005). Firstly, we try to establish a baseline of common uses of partnership in everyday language using corpus-based methods and existing large-scale corpora, which also help us to pinpoint specialised uses of the term. Secondly, we analyse a specialised web-based corpus limited to academic web pages to provide a more focussed insight into how the word is used in this particular context. Thirdly, we investigate how the term partnership is used within higher education through the analysis of focus group and in-depth interviews with staff and students as well as key policies and guidance documents on teaching and learning partnerships in the UK.

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Funded by SSAHRI grant, UH.

Dr Joanne McDowell

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).

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(2015- to date)

Collaborative work with the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Funded by Santander Collaboration Grant, UH.

Dr Joanne McDowell

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.

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(forthcoming 2017)

Dr Gwyneth James

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.

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(2016 – to date)

Collaborative work with a colleague from the Open University.

Dr Gwyneth James

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.

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(forthcoming 2017)

Funded by HBS Learning & Teaching Award. Collaborative work with colleagues from the Business School, UH.

Dr Gwyneth James

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.

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(2015 - to date)

Collaborative work with School of Education, UH. Funded by SSAHRI grant.

Dr Joanne McDowell

This project compares the teaching strategies of teaching assistants to those of fully qualified teachers to examine the role that teaching assistants play in the classroom. This work will contribute to the understanding of teaching and learning through the linguistic analysis of empirical data (spontaneous classroom interaction) to generate findings that focus on the linguistic behaviour of TAs and teachers and how this may relate to learning in order to create the impact-rich potential of developing the training of TAs; build multidisciplinary links  with the School of Education (UH), School of Humanities (UH), practitioners, schools and the University of Hertfordshire which will strengthen the community partnership and knowledge transfer work of the University.

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(2015 – to date)

Dr Saskia Kersten

In computer-mediated communication (CMC), people need a username when logging on to various services. These usernames, or usernames, can be assigned (as for example in a workplace context) or may be self-selected (for example on social networking sites such as Twitter or Flickr). This project, led by Peter Schlobinski and Torsten Siever (both Leibniz University Hannover, Germany), looks at self-selected usernames people use to in a variety of websites across 14 different languages. Saskia Kersten and her colleague Netaya Lotze from the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (Germany) work on usernames in a UK context. A range of username features will be analysed, including semantic, syntactic and graphemic structure. In addition, this project also explores the strategies people employ when choosing a username for themselves.

For more details on this project.

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(2016 – to date)

Funded by: UH Proof of Concept: Route to Market

Dr Christina Schelletter

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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