PhD Supervision Interests

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

Research Interests

My best-known work focused on the social context of written academic texts, especially in science, treating such issues as politeness, cohesion, narrative structure, commonplaces, and illustration, drawing on frameworks from the sociology of scientific knowledge. More recent work has studied expression of opinions in talk, particularly in focus groups and consultation processes; the approach is largely through conversation analysis. I have written five books: Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Science (Wisconsin, 1990), Words in Ads (Arnold, 1994), Ad Worlds: Brands, Media, Audiences (Arnold, 1998), Matters of Opinion: Talking about Public Issues (Cambridge, 2004, and .Discourse of Blogs and Wikis(Continuum, 2010). See my blog on this topic at The Language of Blogs.

My current research, with Sofia Lampropoulou, draws on an ESRC-funded project on 'The Construction of Stance in Social Research Interviews'.

I edit the Elsevier journal Discourse Context & Media. I am also on the Editorial Boards of the journals Applied Linguistics, Discourse & Society, ESPecialist, Language in Society, Language Teaching Research, Science as Culture, Text & Talk, and Written Communication. With Ruth Wodak, I edit the John Benjamins book series Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society, and Culture.

In 2011 I was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. I have been active in the Ross Priory seminars on Broadcast Talk since 1995.  I am Chair (2012-15) of BAAL, the British Association for Applied Linguistics.

Current Teaching

In 2012-13, I convene the following modules:

Ling 211 - The Language of Advertising

Ling 317 - Language at Work

Ling 442 - Introduction to Discourse Studies

Additional Information

Recent Publications

[with Sofia Lampropoulou] "Impersonal you and stance in social research interviews" Journal of Pragmatics 44(10): 1206-1218.

"Analysing interaction in broadcast debates" in R. Wodak and Krzyzanowski (eds.) Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences. London: Palgrave, 2008.

[with Jackie Abell] "Analysing research interviews" in R. Wodak and Krzyzanowski (eds.) Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences. London: Palgrave, 2008.

Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London: Continuum, 2010.

See Lancaster e-prints for links to some pdf files.