Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis
Explore our research into language use in social contexts, from classroom to workplace.
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistic research examines language use in its social context, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methods. Research in the area ranges from the diverse use of languages to variation in linguistic choices at a more micro level. Staff cover topics extending from language maintenance in diasporic communities, to the dynamic use of linguistic resources, to the ways in which we index our various social identities in interaction with others.
Active and recent research projects in this area
There have been several large-scale projects in the School over the past three decades representing our strengths in Sociolinguistics. These include:
- The Language in the Workplace Project (LWP) investigating effective communication in New Zealand workplaces using a discourse analysis approach in a sociolinguistic tradition.
- Translanguaging Aotearoa which investigates translanguaging (the dynamic use of linguistic resources) including in the context of early childhood education in collaboration with puna reo and a'oga amata
- Studies of language maintenance and shift in a number of speech communities (including the Samoan, Tongan, Greek, Cantonese, Gujarati, Hindi, Arabic, Assyrian and Dutch communities in Wellington)
- Studies of how speakers handle variation in situations of language and dialect contact, for example creole languages, second language speakers of English
- The Wellington Corpora of New Zealand English (WCNZE) and New Zealand's contribution to the International Corpus of English (ICE-NZ
- The Wellington Social Dialect Project (aka the Porirua Project), a social dialect survey of New Zealand English in the Wellington area
Researchers able to supervise in this area
Staff who supervise postgraduate research in Sociolinguistics are:
In addition, the following supervise research in Sociophonetics, in particular looking at how speech variation affects speech processing:
Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis is the study of language in use, both in spoken and written contexts (see also Sociolinguistics above). While we specialise in qualitative approaches involving Interactional Sociolinguistics, Social Constructionism, Critical Discourse Studies, genre analysis and discursive (socio) pragmatics, corpus assisted and computational approaches to discourse also feature in our research.
Active and recent research projects in this area
- The longstanding Language in the Workplace Project which has been hosted by the School since 1996, working with more than 35 workplaces and collating a corpus of effective communication that has been described as of “international significance”
- Numerous investigations of the co-construction of identity, typically with recognition of the ideologies that impact on their negotiation in interaction
There is also a strong focus on classroom talk (see also Classroom Based Research), and vocational education, including:
- The Language in Trades Education (LATTE) project which brings together Applied Linguists, polytechnic academic support staff, physicists, plumbers, carpenters, automotive engineers, and welders to investigate written and visual expression of meaning in student and professional texts.
An active network of discourse analytic scholars meets fortnightly to workshop data, and to try out new ideas and concepts. This network includes experts and novices, staff and students, those from (applied) linguistics and other cognate disciplines. As a collaborative research area, there is a strong motivation for supporting other researchers for the purposes of warranting our interpretations.
The School hosted the Asia-Pacific Applied Linguistics and Professional Practices Conferences (2017) and will also host the New Zealand Discourse Conference (2023). In February 2021 we hosted the first of five annual symposia in Discourse Analysis supported by the Ian Gordon Trust.