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Dr Alan Jones

Staff Name

Formal name: Alan Jones

Position: Senior Lecturer

Personal Title: Dr

Qualifications: BA (Hons.) USyd., RSA Cert TEFLA ACE, PhD ANU (RSPAS)

Telephone: +61 2 9850 9664

Email: Alan.Jones@ling.mq.edu.au

Location:C5A 505

Web Pages: Selected Publications

Research Supervishion: Students/Topics

Selected Articles: Conceptual development in technical and text book writing, Teaching the Discourse of Legal Risk to Finance Professionals, and Tense/Aspect/Mood in Mekeo: A Reanalysis

Profile

Dr Alan Jones joined Macquarie University in 1998, when he was responsible for the EAP Section (specializing in English for Academic Purposes). Alan currently convenes and teaches LING969 'Teaching English for Academic Purposes' – a unit of study designed for practising EAP teachers. See http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/postgraduate/units/ling969/index.htm

Alan also convenes a Doctorate in Professional Communication and a Masters program in Communication in Professions and Organisations. Along with Professor Chris Candlin he also supervises a number of PhD students in this general area. The approach espoused in coursework is interdisciplinary, research based, and is influenced by Critical Discourse Analysis. See: http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/postgraduate/coursework/cpop.htm

Alan convenes and teaches LING956/DPC956 'Acquiring Professional Communicative Expertise' (a core unit in the Masters in Communication in the Professions and Organizations). From Semester 2, 2008, he will also convene and teach on LING939 'Writing in Professions and Organisations'. See: http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/news/articles/Flier%20LING939%205-5-08.pdf

Alan has a longstanding interest in descriptive and theoretical linguistics, and in language typology. His doctorate consisted of a comparative description of the four dialects of Mekeo, an Austronesian language of Central Province, Papua New Guinea . At the University of Sydney he did extensive comparative work on intransitive verbs across a range of Asian languages (Mandarin, Indonesian, and Japanese). Pidgin and creole languages (and languages in contact) are an ongoing research interest, and in the 1980s Alan recorded two previously unknown trade pidgins based on Mekeo.

Current Research                                                                                   

Alan is currently researching communicative expertise in professions and organizations, with a special interest in the way communicative skills contribute to professional expertise. Alan has collaborated and co-published with specialists in physics, accounting, and law, investigating subject-specific discourses and developing innovative curricula using a model that can be described as linguistically scaffolded curriculum. He is at present working on a materials development project with a academic lawyer from the Macquarie Centre for Applied Finance, for a course that focuses on legal discourse in relation to financial risk.

In 2004, Alan brought a large-scale teaching development project (funded by two competitive Flagship Grants) to a successful conclusion. That project was entitled ‘The Integration of Generic Skills with Core Curriculum in Economic and Financial Studies’ and ran from 2001 to 2004. While focusing initially on curriculum development and the professional development of academic staff, the grant generated a considerable number of research publications. The team carried out research into generic skills and the integration of language and content as well as into student perceptions, priorities, goals and motivations of generic skills. The project resulted in a book that is now widely used in first year accounting courses, at Macquarie and in elsewhere: A. Jones and S. Sin (2003) Generic Skills in Accounting (Prentice Hall/Pearson).

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