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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

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc 12