An investigation into different types of ambiguity used in childrenâs jokes and into when children understand these different types of ambiguity (using Piagetâs framework of cognitive development and an Incongruity Resolution theory of humour). Findings from the study are aimed at informing content planning and implementation of developmentally appropriate jokes in the primary curriculum â specifically KS2
Linguistics Student Profiles
Linguistics
Barber, Kate
Right-wing extremism is growing, particularly within the present political climate. While previous academic focus has been on right-wing rhetoric on race, little has examined how its anti-feminist agenda presents itself, especially in relation to sexual offences against women. Recent campaigns to prevent rape on campuses, provide education on consent, and an increasing trend to look at âhookup cultureâ from a feminist viewpoint have led to the Alternative-Right (Alt-Right) proclaiming that men are often victims of ârape paranoiaâ. Understanding how this extreme right-wing propaganda influences menâs views of rape and sexual assault is crucial in order to develop counter-measures.
The proposed research will be based on linguistic analyses of comments on Alt-Right websites which discuss convictions for rape and sexual assault. The analyses will examine portrayals of convicted rapists presented as being victims of feminist-driven ‘rape paranoia’. Such construals targeted towards young men will be investigated with reference to current radicalisation frameworks. The two main research questions to be addressed by the research are:
- How, linguistically, are rape and sexual assault cases recontextualised by promoters of right-wing extremism?
- Which of the recontextualised features are the most salient for audience members who comment within the online forums?
Bergstrom, Axel
Dementia is a disease that very often causes communication difficulties which can be highly challenging for both for people with dementia and their carers. My project is aiming to evaluating and developing communication training for carers to people with dementia in Wales, mainly using relevant linguistic communication theory.
The project will investigate communicative obstacles preventing people with dementia and carers from reaching their communicative goals. Furthermore, linguistic theory relevant to the dementia context will be applied in order to detect supported ways of facilitating communication in the given setting. Lastly, ways of introducing new forms of communication to carers will be explored in collaboration with Six Degrees in Salford.
Bowen, Neil Evan
My thesis explores the dynamics of choice in digital text construction. Specifically, it focuses on the development of academic writing from a social semiotic viewpoint, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (e.g. Halliday), semiotic sociology (e.g. Bernstein), and sociogenetic psychology (e.g. Vygotsky). Its primary aims are: (i) To contribute to the dearth of longitudinal studies that provide an emic understanding of the development of academic writing practices, particular with regard to L2 writers; (ii) To illustrate how the logogenesis of texture can reveal the ontogenetic development and potential of the individual with regard to context and co-text; (iii) Demonstrate how a more holistic approach to the study of writing development can be beneficial to advancing theory, educational practice, and interdisciplinary knowledge.
Bristow, Ellen
My research is in the field of vocabulary development. I have designed a morphology and etymology focused Vocabulary Development Programme, which explores whether explicit teaching of word parts, word history and vocabulary decoding skill could influence pupilsâ ability to comprehend complex, unfamiliar academic vocabulary at the transition from primary to secondary school.
Brookes, Charlie
This research project explores the linguistic representation of domestic abuse in the courtroom, by examining how witnesses and trial lawyers discursively (co)construct victimhood in two key trial genres: witness examinations and opening and closing statements. More broadly, this project aims to determine the extent to which domestic abuse myths and stereotypes, particularly those pertaining to victimhood, are ingrained within trial discourse.
Campbell, Rowan
This PhD project aims to examine the accents of English spoken in Cardiff from the perspective of dialect levelling â a process occurring across Britain whereby some regional accent variants are losing ground in favour of supralocal variants. Apparent-time methodology will be used along with archive data in order to see any changes that have occurred and are occurring in Cardiff English, which will be identified by a range of phonological and morphosyntactic features. Cardiffâs history of diversity and in-migration make it an interesting location to examine from this perspective, as it is accepted that these factors have already played a role in the difference and ânon-Welshnessâ of CE when compared to other South Walian Englishes.
The data will consist of sociolinguistic interviews with older and younger speakers from Cardiff, and archive audio recordings from the 1980s and 1990s. Mixed methods in variationist sociolinguistics will be used to analyse the rates of selected features across the datasets, as this approach can give a fuller understanding of any processes underlying language change.
Carr, Alexander
My research focuses on the nature and degree of nominality. While it is widely accepted that nouns and verbs constitute two separate lexical classes, this distinction has been shown to be unsatisfactory due to variably applied criteria which inconsistently mix morphology, syntax and semantics (Lyons 1977:423). For example, one problem is that semantic distinctions such as event vsâŻobject are not reliable, e.g. the noun âfireâ behaves verbally, like a deverbal noun, but this meaning is not inherited from a verb (Vendler 1967:141). Hanks (2013:73) suggests that lexical items, in isolation, do not possess inherent meaning, but âmeaning potentialâ, which is activated when placed in a context. In the field of Lexical Semantics, the analysis of word meaning from the âSemasiologicalâ perspective provides a beneficial heuristic to view the various meanings a nominal can express. By exploring the multidimensional interconnections of meaning within lexical items, we can examine how such nominals can express both event and object semantics. Nevertheless, while this analysis has allowed us to explore the semantics of nominals at a level that cannot be attained from only looking at classifications of lexical class, it does not explicitly provide us with empirical data on how the semantics of these nominals generally behave.Therefore, the aims of this research are threefold: (1) to determine how the nature and degree of nominality can be evaluated, (2) to determine how object, state, and event meaning come to be expressed in nominal forms and (3) to examine the relationship between the syntactic behaviour and the semantic properties of underived event nominals (UENs).
Chrispin, Lucy
My proposed research focuses on the indeterminate nature of certain types of verbs. Theories address the categorisation of verbs in terms of grammatical and semantic approaches, however do not identify the language processes involved and whether these categories have any psychological validity. Certain verbs are problematic with regards to categorisation, for example in behavioural processes the grammar and the semantics encode different information. Therefore, this research proposes to merge what is already known about these problematic verbs with psycholinguistic testing, in order to identify how conceptual events that are being represented are processed and categorized by speakers.
Coffey, Milo
Patients’ understanding of medical terminology is crucial, as studies have shown that incomplete or misunderstanding of these words can lead to problems with treatment and adverse outcomes, as well as undermine consent.
My research aims to investigate the extent to which people understand medical terms, how confident they are in their understanding, and what kinds of associations they might have with these words. This will be accomplished by building on methods successfully employed in similar research focusing on cancer terminology.
This research will contribute to knowledge of which words and phrases cause problems with understanding when they are used in consultations. Identifying these issues will enable medical professionals to be more aware of the language they use and adapt it where necessary to ensure effective communication. This should in turn lead to patients being able to both better consent to and better participate in decision-making about their health.
Collier, Emma
This research centres around the relationship between motion verbs (for example, ‘leave’) and their noun â or nominal â counterparts (for example, ‘arrival’). The specific types of nominals focused on in this research are those which have been derived from verbs, referred to as ‘deverbal nouns’. Whilst literature in the field has given extensive attention to motion verbs, research on motion nouns is comparatively absent, leaving many questions regarding the lexical, grammatical and semantic features of these deverbal nouns unanswered. Work that has been carried out on the verb-deverbal noun relationship is also somewhat conflicting, with contradictory accounts of how these nominalisations behave.
The aims of this research are threefold, corresponding to the following research questions:
- What is the nature of the motion construal (i.e. lexico-grammatical and semantic properties) of motion nouns compared to their corresponding verbs?
- To what extent does the orientation and composition of the verb-noun pair play a role in the distribution of the semantic features between them (e.g. deverbal nouns, denominal verbs, conversion, borrowings, etc.)?
- How can we account for new meanings emerging from the nominal category, both in terms of type and frequency?
These research questions will be approached with a three-stage methodology. First, a large dataset of verb-noun pairs will be built, and a general corpus (such as the British National Corpus) will be used to extract approximately 250 concordance outputs. Secondly, etymological details will be added to the database, followed by a statistical analysis to identify semantic patterns across the pairs. Finally, drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, a lexico-grammatical analysis will be conducted to provide an insight into the new meanings which emerge from the deverbal motion noun category.
This research will have applications in fields such as computational linguistics, language learning and teaching, and translation, in addition to establishing a database for typological and contrastive work on motion verb-noun pairs.
Deeming, Atlee
A study into the effectiveness of readability strategies on look-a-like words in first and second language users of English
To investigate how first and second language users of English read look-a-like words, for example, interlingual homographs, minimal pairs, and cognates.  To test the effectiveness of different reading strategy interventions through the measurement of reaction times and error rates in lexical decision tasks. To develop a model of lexical representation and processing of reading look-a-like words, leading to a real-world application experiment with TALLman lettering in medication.
Goodwin, Aurora
My proposed research focuses on how language is used on Twitter disinformation accounts to authenticate identity performances. I will focus specifically on the use of metadata (profile information such as usernames), affiliative hashtag use, and other language features associated with certain social groups (e.g. vernacular forms).
Kavanagh, Katharine
My proposed research will explore the potential for a bridging communicative stance that can allow for more effective communication between elite and populist discourse communities, using for its case study reports on the experience of circus-based performing arts events.
A multi-methodology approach will draw from the fields of Audience Research and Corpus-based Discourse Analysis, examining evaluative language use in corpora of âlegitimateâ public texts (publicity materials and published reviews), and transcripts of âlayâ audience member responses (from focus group activity with circus attendees).
The thesis will highlight and address any issues of conflict between the value systems of text producers and target audiences, laying groundwork for more effective communication strategies to be developed that integrate multiple value systems.
Kelly, Paul
Following the work of Fairclough on the political rhetoric of New Labour (2000; 2010), this research will attempt to diachronically analyse the rhetoric of the Conservative Party in order to examine the similarities and differences in the current rhetorical strategies of both political Parties. Fairclough connected rhetorical strategies of New Labour to changes in the mode of governance: the incorporation of marketing practices into the political decision making process was claimed to be connected to linguistic patterning in a corpus of New Labour texts. Since the modern Conservative Party also employs such marketing practices, there is reason to expect some aspects of linguistic continuity in rhetorical strategies. If continuity in rhetorical strategies of two major political Parties were taken to be damaging to the concept of political representation, this investigation could, therefore, have powerful implications for the state of democracy as we know it.
Langner, Alice
In the UK, 1 in every 700 babies are born with cleft lip and/or palate (NHS, 2020). Most infants with cleft palate receive full restorative surgery, but up to half of them do not reach full speech proficiency (Wren 2017). My research aims to better understand why speech difficulties persist in infants who have had successful cleft palate repair surgery through an analysis of early vocal production. The methodology integrates an established theory of speech acquisition presented by Vihman (2014:121). The articulatory filter hypothesis (AFH) proposes that infants notice words in their input speech that match their production, which, in turn, encourages a matching behaviour of phoneme-babble resemblances that encourage further vocal production. The AFH foregrounds the significance of production in early speech and highlights the phonological feedback-loop as a key foundation for later linguistic advances. Exploration of this theory could elucidate the role of matching to the acoustic/phonetic properties of caregiver input for reaching target-like speech.
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Research Questions:
-How do the acoustic-phonetic properties of babbled consonants at 13-14 months differ between typically developing infants and infants after cleft palate repair?
-To what extent do CP infants respond to the sounds of caregiver speech in their own babble?
-To what extent do patterns of babbling and caregiver input matching predict speech and language outcomes at 24 and 36 months?
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My research will bring a new perspective to an established theory of speech acquisition by considering Vihmanâs AFH framework in the context of a clinical speech disorder. It will explore the extent to which an infantâs own vocalisations support/disrupt their path to full phonological proficiency after cleft palate restoration. The research could impact our understanding of the articulatory feedback-loop in the developmental processes of children with speech disorders and may support clinical provisions for infants after cleft palate repair.
Lukic, Mihaila
Despite over 85,000 US law enforcement officers being investigated for misconduct over the past decade, there have been no academic studies that I know of on the discourse of interviews of police officers conducted as part of such investigations. This research is particularly vital because of the US publicâs record low confidence in the police. The current study therefore aims to address societal concerns in relation to the perceived âblue wall of silenceâ, by adding greater transparency regarding the procedures in place during investigations of police officers.
Specifically, this project aims to develop an understanding of how identity, narrative and power are discursively managed during investigative interviews of police officers following their use of deadly force in the line of duty. This qualitative study will employ thematic analysis in order to identify themes of interest, with a pragmatic approach to analysis then being used to analyze key stretches of discourse.
Marsh-Rossney, Rosie
Working in partnership with TARIAN ROCU this PhD will investigate online grooming language, focusing on offender-to-offender communication
In the past, most research into paedophile language has focused on offline grooming and the interactions between offenders and victims. Increasingly, research into online grooming communication has developed and linguists have become involved in the field. However, little research has been done on the communication between offenders online despite the potential for improving profiling, identification, and prevention.
Using data from real offender-to-offender interactions, this project will aim to understand the offenderâs modus operandi and offending processes, as well as risk-taking practises and hierarchies in online grooming communities. Computer assisted discourse studies (CADS) methods will be employed to contribute to this under-researched area of the field by examining offender-to-offender communication separately from victim-to-offender communication. The direct impact of this research on law enforcement protocols and practice could manifest via improvements in coded-message detection, linguistic profiling of offenders, and enabling more successful infiltration of online grooming networks by undercover police.
Mathias, Erin
A confession is a highly valuable form of forensic evidence (Redlich et al. 2018: 147), and if a confession is recorded, it is more likely to be admitted to court as evidence (Solan and Tiersma 2005: 53-72). However, while research on confessions within contexts such as police interview is plentiful, little is known about how confessions are managed by legal and lay participants in the courtroom. Similarly, there has been much research on the impact of lawyersâ courtroom recontextualisation strategies on the interpretation of other legal evidence (see Heffer, Rock and Conley 2013), but no studies focus specifically on the recontextualisation of recorded confessions.
This project therefore takes as its broad central research question:
How â lexically, syntactically and paralinguistically â do lawyers and confession witnesses
re-, de- and co-construct the meaning, authority and significance of confessions during witness examination and closing arguments?
To investigate, I will gather data from three US trials with corresponding confession evidence. All instances where confessions are recontextualised at trial will be identified and analysed then, crucially, compared to the source confession to more fully assess recontextualisation practices. These will be analysed using interactional sociolinguistics, a method that lends itself to exploring the connection between âsmall-scale interactionsâ and âlarge-scale sociological effectsâ (Jaquement 2011: 475).
In terms of impact, topically, this study will enhance knowledge in three key research areas: recontextualisation, digital evidence, confessions. Methodologically, use of interactional sociolinguistics as analytical mode âpromises to solve real-word problems involving communication ⊠by shedding light on the nature of meaning in languageâ (Tannen 1992: 12). Societally, this project has potential for more wide-ranging impact. Presence of a confession increases conviction likelihood (Kassin and Neuman 1997) â a decision made in courtrooms dependent on how that evidence is recontextualised by legal and lay participants. Thus, by identifying areas requiring communicative reform, this study could improve judicial fairness.
References
Heffer, C., Rock, F. and Conley, J. Legal-lay communication: Textual travels in the law. New York: Oxford UP.
Jaquement, M. 2011. Crosstalk 2.0: Asylum and communicative breakdown. Take and Talk 31(4): 375-502.
Kassin, S. M. and Neumann, K. 1997. On the power of confession evidence: An experimental test of the fundamental difference hypothesis. Law and Human Behaviour 21: 469-484.
Redlich, A. D., Yan, S., Norris, R. J., and Bushway, S. D. 2018. The influence of confessions on guilty pleas and plea discounts. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 24(2): 147-157.
Solan, L. M. and Tiersma, P. 2005. Speaking of crime: The language of criminal justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tannen, D. 1992. Interactional sociolinguistics. In: Bright, W. ed. Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 9-12.
Mills, Chloe
Vocabulary is one of the key predictors of academic success and vocabulary deficits can limit a childâs educational development. The âword gapâ has been a pervasive issue in vocabulary research since the nineties and remains an issue today. However, our understanding of these issues is limited by a lack of normative figures for vocabulary growth and development for children.
This research seeks to answer the following principal questions:
- How much vocabulary and which vocabulary is learned each year from three yearsâ old up to the age of eleven?
- Is there evidence from OUPâs Learner Corpus, which contains data over 20 years, that vocabulary knowledge is diminishing?
- How is the lexical acquisition observed in this project best explained through theories and models of lexical acquisition in young learners?
The vocabulary sizes of children in a school in Wales will be measured using a vocabulary size test that should be sensitive enough to measure the variation in scores which underlies variation in educational performance, and also identify lexical items that distinguish high performing learners from low performing learners.
The second stage of this research project will be to use the Oxford University Press corpus of child English to evaluate whether lexical knowledge has diminished over the last 20 years. Changes in lexical sophistication will be examined and if the number and range of words used by children is diminishing over time then this will support the hypothesis that overall vocabulary knowledge is also diminishing.
The experiments carried out in this research will shed more light upon the state of the vocabularies of young children.
Mullineux, Ruth
Working in partnership with NSPCC Cymru/Wales, this PhD will linguistically analyse victims’ own accounts of being groomed online.
Research into how the grooming process operates has until recently focused on offline contexts. Progressively, there has been a growing awareness of the need to explore how grooming operates in online spaces. To date, much of this research has focused on offender profiling. Research into the victimsâ perspective of online grooming remains scarce. The research that exists tends to focus on risk and vulnerability factors, often using qualitative interview or survey methods that provide secondary, retrospective accounts.
This project will build on research that identifies online grooming as a communicative process, specifically aiming to explore how the victim/child talks about the experience of being groomed online. It is envisaged that, by exploring the under-researched topic of the victim’s perspective using hitherto under-utilised methodologies (linguistics and action research), this research will both advance understanding of online grooming communication and apply its findings to practice enhancement geared towards better prevention and, ultimately, improved protection for children.
Paice, Susannah
The project aims to investigate a radically usage-based approach to the learning of second languages (L2s), including Welsh as an L2. Usage-based theories of language and of language learning have become very influential over the past 15 years, including in explaining first language acquisition. However, its insights have not been widely applied to L2 learning where methodology still follows more traditional understandings of language learning. This project addresses this shortcoming by investigating how fully usage-based L2 learning would work.
It will use SaySomethingIn (SSi) as a case study of a potentially usage-based language learning programme to ascertain how the framework may or may not be an accurate and useful portrayal of second language acquisition. This will involve a mixed methods approach, including quantitative data from the SSi programme and qualitative data from participants.
Perkins, Keighley
Working with law enforcement, this PhD will investigate the images used by radical right-wing groups on social media.
Platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have proved to be valuable tools for radical right-wing groups in that they provide access to vast audiences for little cost and minimal risk. As such, social media platforms can now be described as âthe weapon of choice for extremist propagandistsâ (Luckert, 2017).
In particular, images are an effective means of persuasion for radical right-wing groups as they are easier to for audiences to process and, therefore, remember (Sternberg, 2006; Messaris and Abraham, 2001). Additionally, images transcend language barriers (Kovacs, 2015) and have a lasting emotive impact on audiences (Zelizer, 2010), making them transferrable across different contexts.
This project will, therefore, build on a relatively under-explored area by identifying the linguistic and visual strategies that radical right-wing groups use to communicate their ideologies and radicalise new members.
Powell, Emily
My project explores the use of linguistic features to navigate agency in narratives written by offenders before they commit crimes. It will take the form of a diachronic corpus stylistic analysis of pre-crime manifestos, diaries and vlogs, and will aim to analyse how agency changes as the perpetrators move closer to committing their crimes, with a view to developing a diachronic model of agency in pre-crime narratives.
Singh, Jaspal
The project presents a synchronic, local and group-specific report of the various uses of English in urban India. I chose to study the everyday interaction of young members of the so-called middle-class in one of Indiaâs big cities. I regard the middle-class as a discursively constructed social stratum which is ideologically intertwined with language. I am planning to observe a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1995) â ideally a friendship clique â and analyse their habitual uses of linguistic and social interaction. Thus speakers will not be studied individually but in an environment of collaborating actors who are jointly negotiating, contesting and refining personal and group identities. Above and beyond a description, the research is therefore able to explore the social meaning of linguistic performances.
Steel, Kate
My thesis focuses on communication between police officers and alleged victims at the scene during domestic abuse call-outs in England and Wales. Having been a largely unexplored site of empirical research, call-out interactions are now accessible due to the proliferation of police body-worn video (BWV). The study takes a linguistic ethnographic approach to explore the interpersonal work done by both police and alleged victims at the scene.
This project is motivated by the belief that a more contextualised and nuanced understanding of these pivotal interactions could inform the improvement of services provided by the police and other agencies to those affected by domestic abuse.
Tita, Edith M
Often in police interviews where an interpreter is present, the interviewers and interviewees address the interpreter instead of each other; occasionally they might switch from one to another (sometimes more than once) in the course of the same interview. This project aims to use naturally-occurring data to investigate, from a discourse-analytical perspective, the possible consequences of this phenomenon in terms of rapport-building and the achievement of conversational goals.
Williams, Lowri
This project will build on preliminary work by Fontaine and Williams (2021) to develop a description of the Welsh language through the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework.
I intend to focus my research primarily on the verb-noun (Welsh: berfenw): a word class which does not exist in most other Indo-European languages. The verb-noun has been an enduring interest for scholars owing to its perceived ambiguous nature as neither fully verbal nor nominal, although the dearth of analysis conducted to date has largely been through generative frameworks devoid of ‘real’ data, e.g. Willis (1988) and Borseley et al. (2007).
In contrast with these formal approaches, proponents of SFL view language as a meaning-making resource, placing function and context front-and-centre in their analysis. Language and context are therefore interdependent: a language simultaneously constructs – and is constructued by – the community or culture in which it’s used (Thompson 2014). There is, however, no expectation that all languages (or indeed cultures) will be constructued in the same way: for a theory to be considered robust and flexible, it must contain as many varieties as possible (Fontaine 2006). The need for a functional description of Welsh is therefore evident, not only to expand our understanding of Welsh and the wider Celtic language family, but also to enhance the SFL framework itself.
It will draw on methods developed in the field of corpus linguistics to conduct a study in which the relevant Welsh language data are systematically identified, collected, and analysed, thus responding to calls from Gibson and Fedorenko (2013) and Lindquist (2009) for the use of empirical research methods in the production of language descriptions.
Yeerjiang, Anaer
âThe story of Wales is the story of its peopleâ. Wales is a land of rich cultural diversity, yet this diversity is not being reflected in the schools. According to the Welsh government statistical data, Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) teachers have notably low representation in Welsh schools, as less than 1% of teachers are from BAME backgrounds. It is well evidenced that a diverse education workforce is important for students to gain all-round development, improving graduation and college-entrance rates (Villegas and Irvine, 2010). More importantly, teachers with a diverse background are more likely to address racism and bias in the classroom, and so better prepare students for a diverse global context (Grissom and Redding, 2016). Therefore, it is crucial that the voice of BAME teachers be heard and recognised in the schools.
In light of this context, this study will focus on the reasons for and impact of the underrepresentation of BAME teachers in Welsh schools, with the further goal of seeking potential solutions that would lead to increasing diversity and promoting inclusion. In order to answer the research aim, this research will explore how BAME teachers and students make sense of their cultural and linguistic identities; how White teachers interpret and respond to the linguistic and culturally expressions of BAME teachers and students; how BAME teachers and students report and interpret responses to their cultural expression; and what factors affect BAME teachers and studentsâ self-perceptions and choices.
This research will shed light on the role of social inclusion and diversity as the powerful tool to âbuild a society for allâ. It is globally recognised that fostering cultural awareness and sensitivity in the classrooms is significant, as it not only provides students with a wide range of experiences of cultures, but also enhances their perceptions and responsibilities as global citizens. This study will provide evidence for those aiming to tackle racism and prejudice in Welsh schools, as well as enabling education policy to be more visible and supportive to BAME teachers and students in Wales. Although the movements such as Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate are arousing the consciousness of people to stand against racism and discrimination, stereotypes always appear in many different guises, verbal or non-verbal. Therefore, this research will provide an opportunity for all to take part in a reflective discussion and further learning about racism, discrimination and social exclusion.
Furthermore, this study will have implications on policy practices. By providing solid evidence of lived experience of BAME teachers and students, stakeholders can make efforts to ensure that the school recruitment, promotion and retention opportunities are more accessible for BAME teachers, which will allow them to act as role models for ethnic minority students. Finally, this study will contribute to pedagogical approaches by encouraging intercultural learning in the classrooms. As UNESCO advocates for building dialogues between students and different cultures that can make meaningful contributions to sustainable and tolerant societies, there is no doubt that teachers from BAME backgrounds can deliver more culturally responsive curriculums that allow students to develop intercultural competencies.
Cardiff Universityâs Centre for Language and Communication Research and Swansea Universityâs Language Research Centre match compatibility with distinctiveness and complementary offerings. Swansea specialises in language testing and media discourse and memory. Cardiff offers sociolinguistics (especially variation), functional grammar, language and law (especially courtroom discourse and police-lay interaction), word association, formulaic language, language and ageing, including dementia interaction, multimodality including graphic novels and comics and corpus linguistics. The pathway is therefore located in a dynamic hub for the development of new theory at the interface of language form, function, use and processing, and corpus-based discourse linguistics.
The Linguistics pathway sits within a rich research environment, recognised in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework for its very high quality and containing several major externally-funded research projects. It offers all students opportunities such as discourse analytic training, deepening understanding of the richness and potential of theoretically-informed and linguistically-mediated approaches to content analysis. Corpus linguistics training is also on offer, enabling the examination of large bodies of text for patterns.
Students on this pathway are fully engaged in broader research activities, including committed involvement in our research committee, student-staff panel, postgraduate research seminar series and other forums, and in social events, which, like the summer postgraduate research conference, are organised by the students themselves.
Students on the ‘1+3’ route complete the specialist Language and Communication Research Masters programme which has a linguistically-oriented exemplification of core concepts and techniques. Subject-specific training and student development continues throughout the doctorate including two annual PhD conferences with external expert guests, providing students with feedback on the content and presentation of their research.