Research affiliates

Pascal Brown

Pascal is owner and CEO of Blaise Consulting Services in Auckland. His MA study Might be worth getting it done then: Realisations of Directives in a New Zealand factory explores the characteristics of directives in a tanning factory in South Auckland. It focuses on the language of the manager, the pay clerk and the accountant as they interact with supervisors, administration staff and shop-floor employees. His website and resources can be found at www.jobsearchenglish.com.

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pdf38KBMight be worth getting it done then: Realisations of Directives in a New Zealand factory

Nicola Daly

Nicola is based at Waikato University where she teaches academic writing. She has collaborated with the LWP in the study of cross-cultural pragmatics.

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Angela Joe

Angela Joe is Director of the English Language Institute, Victoria University of Wellington. Her association with the Language in the Workplace Project began in 2004 when Judi McCallum first proposed that the LWP research form the basis of a new workplace communication course for skilled migrants at Victoria University of Wellington. Angela has been involved in a scoping project focusing on undergraduate internships in the Bachelor of Arts drawing on aspects of the workplace communication course and the LWP research.

Deborah Jones

Deborah is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at Victoria University of Wellington, teaching organisational communication and research methods. She has a background in sociolinguistics and literature as well as organisational studies. She has worked for several years to find ways to connect the LWP research with organisational theory and practice, collaborating with other team members on creating a communication evaluation and development process that can be used to work with workplace communication. She is also a member of the CANZ team, with which the LWP has developed a closer research relationship through a combined pilot project.

George Major

George Major is a Researcher on the AMEP Longitudinal Study at Macquarie University, a national, multi-site, qualitative research study funded by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in Australia. Within this project, she is currently focusing on recent migrants’ experiences of preparing for and entering the workforce in Australia, particularly their understanding and development of workplace-specific sociopragmatic competence. Her recently completed PhD thesis is an interactional sociolinguistics study of relational work within interpreter-mediated healthcare interaction in Australia. George's research interests lie mainly in the area of sociolinguistics, and she has experience collecting and analysing interaction data in a variety of workplace and institutional settings. She also has a background in signed language and interpreting research, and qualified as a New Zealand Sign Language interpreter in 2004.

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Caroline Malthus

Caroline is a Senior Lecturer and NESB co-ordinator at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland.

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Jonathan Newton

Jonathan is a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington and specialises in the area of English as a Second Language. He has been involved in a collaborative research project on cross-cultural pragmatics with members of the LWP team. The first stage of this study focused on the language of complaints in the workplace with particular reference to the implications for workers from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

Nicky Riddiford

Nicky is a senior teacher at the English Language Institute, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. Nicky's association with the LWP project began in 2005 when she started designing and teaching Workplace Communication for Skilled Migrants (the Skilled Migrant Programme) at Victoria University of Wellington. The programme draws heavily on the research and recorded data of the LWP for activities designed to develop pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence in a New Zealand workplace setting. Topics covered are small talk, requesting, refusing, disagreeing, making complaints and making suggestions. Nicky and Jonathan Newton have developed a resource for teachers of pragmatics to L2 learners: Workplace Talk in Action . Nicky has also developed materials for learners based on LWP construction site and eldercare data.

Derek Wallace

Derek undertook a pilot study on email use in local (Wellington) organisations, using a mixture of survey and focus group research. His focus was on the place given to email by individuals and organisations compared to other forms of communication and on how email is used to manage differences of power relations in workplaces (and in other communities such as online discussion groups). However, his main research interest in terms of language in the workplace is in the role of writing in producing the work of organisations, particularly government policy bodies.