Former PhD students

Susan Barone

Susan M. Barone's research investigates the intersection of Applied Linguistics and Narrative Medicine and the connection between clinician elicitations and patient narratives in medical clinics. Susan is director of the Vanderbilt University (VU) English Language Center and has a faculty appointment with the VU Graduate School (Research & Theory of Second Language Acquisition) and the Peabody School of Education (Educational Linguistics).

Angela Chan

Angela's research titled Openings and Closings in Business Meetings in Different Cultures involved a comparative analysis of small talk in meetings in Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Openings and Closings in Business Meetings in Different Culturespdf112KB

Tina Chiles

Tina's research examined Mentoring in the Workplace. She analysed mentoring by focusing on the discursive and linguistic strategies that are used by leaders when 'doing mentoring' in white collar workplaces.

Mentoring in the Workplacepdf57KB

Julia de Bres

Julia’s research interests relate to multilingualism in the workplace. Her doctoral and post-doctoral research in New Zealand related to the use of the Maori language at workplaces. She is now an Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg, where her research has included a project on the language ideologies and practices of cross-border workers in Luxembourg. This project focused on practices including code-switching, translation, language accommodation, receptive multilingualism, and the use of linguae francae. Julia is especially interested in how people use language ideologies to advance their interests in multilingual workplace settings. She works on interview and interactional data, using approaches derived from language ideologies theory and interactional sociolinguistics.

Jeannie Fletcher

Jeannie's research investigates the role of conversational interaction in organizational knowledge creation. She analysed interactions by the same people using a variety of mediums, and the relationship between these interactions and the context in which they take place.

Sai Hui (Jon)

Evolving out of his engineering and business management background, Sai has keen research interests in professional and workplace communication. In the last decade or so, he managed discipline-specific English programs and taught EAP and ESP courses at a number of universities in Hong Kong. Sai completed his doctoral research in 2013 examining the negotiation of interpersonal relations between call centre customer service representatives and callers, with a focus on aspects of rapport, power, and identity.

Leilarna Kingsley

After working at the University of Trier in Germany, Leilarna pioneered workplace research in Luxembourg in her PhD, where she explored the intersection of multilingualism and the English language in ten local and international banks. Using developing theories in language policy and innovative methodologies, she focused on analysing the complexity of explicit and implicit dimensions of language policy. Leilarna’s research found that in ethnolinguistically diverse workplaces, employees’ practices were flexible and dynamic. While numerous languages were important, English still emerged as an essential lingua franca for involving and connecting all employees. These findings provided a strong argument for both top-down and bottom-up approaches to language policy.

Ewa Kusmierczyk

Ewa's project stems from the belief that in order to truly understand human interaction, one needs to examine it by looking at the verbal phenomena in conjunction with the nonverbal phenomena. Ewa is examining how verbal actions (spoken language) and nonverbal actions (e.g. postures, gaze and gestures) are mediated in an employment interview and how the contributions of both the candidate and the interviewer determine its outcomes. She is also investigating how migrant candidates fare against NZ candidates in the process of recruitment (from a sociolinguistic perspective) and determining possible culturally-driven presuppositions that create barriers for skilled migrants’ success in obtaining employment.

Kazuyo Murata

Kazu's research is comparing the discourse of business meetings in New Zealand and in Japan. She is analysing business meetings by focusing particularly on the features and functions of talk at the boundaries of meetings using the framework of politeness theory, and on participant perceptions of this talk.

Stephanie Schnurr

Stephanie is Associate Professor at The University of Warwick. Her main research interests are workplace discourse in professional and medical settings. She has widely researched and published on leadership discourse, gender, the multiple functions and strategic uses of humour and laughter, (im)politeness, identity construction and intercultural communication. Stephanie is the author of Exploring Professional Communication (Routledge, 2012) and Leadership Discourse at Work: Interactions of Humour, Gender and Workplace Culture (Palgrave, 2009). She is currently involved in several funded research projects exploring intercultural communication in professional and medical settings in Hong Kong.

Joan Waldvogel

Joan's PhD research examined The Role, Status and Style of Workplace Email: A Study of Two New Zealand Workplaces. Her thesis provides insights into the distinctive stylistic features of workplace email and relates these to organisational culture.

The Role, Status and Style of Workplace Email: A Study of Two New Zealand Workplacespdf57KB

Nick Wilson

Nick Wilson is based at Cardiff University’s Centre for Communication and Language Research, as Lecturer in English Language and Communication. His PhD investigated communicative practices in a rugby team, examining mechanisms for developing ways of doing leadership in the team. Using an ethnographic approach, he tracked the emergence of several Communities of Practice within the team over the course of a rugby season to develop a deep understanding of the team. Additionally, Nick found a high incidence of swearing among players, which indirectly indexed both rugby player identity and masculinity, but was primarily a marker of group membership in the team.